| Art is a game, but like any game it works best when played as if the participants’ lives depend on the outcome. (By the same token, it quickly becomes irritating if its players assume either much more or much less is involved – the fate of the world or just an evening’s entertainment.)
The story is as follows: in 1967, the then-young Danish director Jørgen Leth creates an experimental short, The Perfect Human, which (some time later) is seen by director Lars von Trier, who is deeply affected by it. Thirty-five years later, Leth’s career has gone nowhere and in a fit of depression he has retired to Haiti (a location that testifies eloquently to the depth of his disenchantment). Von Trier, meanwhile, has grown up to become the enfant terrible of contemporary world cinema, a vocational anti-Americanan, author of Dogma 95 (the manifesto, not the movie) and of a number of art-house classics (from Breaking the Waves to Dogville), though to me he’ll always simply be the man who hanged Bjork.
Hearing of Leth’s plight, von Trier decides to re-launch his hero’s career by commissioning a new work but, not given to false modesty, puts himself firmly in charge of the project as conceptualizer and co-director. He chooses to base the new film on the old one, both incorporating the original and generating a set of remakes, each produced by Leth under various constraints imposed by von Trier (each set of constraints constituting one "Obstruction").
The Five Obstructions is therefore many interwoven things. Its first layer is simply a documentary about gonzo art-film making (think Lost in La Mancha); its second is a series of short experimental films (think Best Ads of 2003); its third is a meditation and dialogue about art (think My Dinner With Andre); its fourth is an old-fashioned mainstream action-buddy film (think Werner Herzog’s My Best Fiend – OK, we all have our own definition of mainstream), and its heart is a tortured struggle for personal redemption (think pretty much anything by Bergman).
As expected, all these threads work well. Although the buddy line gets a bit sappy at the end – we are first treated to an elaborate ritual of muted creative sado-masochism, which, let’s face it, is exactly what we were all hoping for, after the Herzog-Kinski epic (even if this couple are just too damned Danish to attempt killing each other on-camera).
And while some of the five remakes are not as successful as others, it is clearly a matter of taste which work best. American viewers (audiences and critics alike) seemed not to get the point of the Brussels episode (which satirized European up-market advertising conventions), while I felt that only the American cartoon version (executed by Waking Life animator Randi Cole, and apparently the favourite among 20-something viewers) was a complete failure, with its indiscriminate mix of B-movie genres cancelling each other out and distracting the viewer, rather than underlining the narrator’s ambivalence towards his subject.
Ironically, the best revision goes almost unnoticed: the excerpts of the original used throughout the film to illustrate the point of departure for each "obstruction" are, in their cut-up form, more effective than either the original version (included as an extra on the DVD) or the formally announced and obstructed remakes. |
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