Idiots

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Movie
German title Idiots
Original title Idiots
Country of production Denmark
original language Danish
Publishing year 1998
length 117 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Lars from Trier
script Lars from Trier
production Vibeke Windelov
camera Lars from Trier
cut Molly Malene Stensgaard
occupation
chronology

←  Predecessor
Breaking the Waves

Successor  →
Dancer in the Dark

Idioten (also Die Idioten , original title: Idioterne ) is a Danish feature film by the Danish director Lars von Trier from 1998. Von Trier was also responsible for the script and tells the story of a group of young people who oppose themselves through idiotic behavior rebel their environment. He's after the festival of Thomas Vinterberg the second Dogme film .

action

Karen, a middle-aged woman, witnesses a minor disturbance in a restaurant: two apparently mentally handicapped young men being looked after by a young woman behave so loudly and conspicuously that they are expelled from the restaurant. One of the two men takes Karen's hand and pulls her out with him, where she sits down with the three of them in a taxi and drives with them. However, the men's handicap turns out to be an act.

The two men and their supervisor turn out to be part of a group of 11 people who have withdrawn into a house and have decided to act as an integrative flat-sharing community, with the roles of the disabled and their carers being alternately exchanged. According to Stoffer, the group's “ideologist”, the aim is to free the “inner idiot”. The group members keep minimal contact with their “middle-class” life. The group lives like a small opposing society in which all freedoms, including group sex, are allowed and are also practiced. They live as a shared apartment in the Danish municipality of Søllerød in an empty country house owned by Stoffers uncle. The house is for sale and Stoffer is supposed to show the house to potential buyers. Stoffer encourages the group to play the idiot in a credible and aggressive way (“We don't mock them, they mock us!”). By forcing civil society to compromise with the group, they gain advantages: the community offers them a substantial sum of money if they leave their home and move the community to another area; a homeowner is compelled to pay the group because he is said to have injured disabled people through insufficiently secured paving stones in his driveway. Potential buyers of the house are deterred by the reference to a neighboring institution for the disabled.

Starting with the "incident" in the restaurant, Karen now accompanies the group's "disabled trips" with distant interest. They tour a factory, visit a swimming pool or try their hand at ski jumping in the middle of summer, with Karen becoming increasingly integrated into the group. Apart from a group of tattooed "bikers", the self-proclaimed idiots are never really taken seriously by the "normal" people.

When Josephine is brought back home by her father against her will and the other members of the group allow this with practically no resistance, the group finally threatens to break up. Stoffer is now trying to give the whole idea more seriousness and demands that one of the group should let out the "inner idiot" in his bourgeois environment. The appropriate person should be identified by spinning the bottle. First it hits Axel, but he refuses and is then the first to voluntarily leave the group. Next, the bottle points to the evening school teacher, who tries in front of his class but ultimately doesn't have the courage to let the “inner idiot” out completely. From that moment on, he too stays away from the group.

Because this makes it clear to everyone that no one from the group is ready for this last step, the members of the group begin to pack their things and leave the common house. Karen, however, wants to take on the challenge so that, in her opinion, it doesn't all go to waste. She asks Susanne for her support. Together they drive to Karen's family. Her mother, grandfather, sisters and her husband Anders are amazed at their sudden return. It turns out that Karen had been missing for almost 2 weeks and was even thought to be dead. Only now does Susanne find out from Karen's sister that Karen and her husband had lost their son Martin just before Karen joined the "idiots". His funeral took place the day after they met in the restaurant without Karen's presence. Her deeply injured husband accuses her that the loss of her child doesn't seem so bad to her. In the presence of her angry husband and the rest of the family, Karen plays the madwoman, whereupon her husband beats her. Karen and Susanne then leave the apartment crying.

History of origin

After Thomas Vinterberg's Das Fest (1998), Idioten is the second film based on the dogma rules. Von Trier did not adhere rigidly to the rules set up together with Vinterberg, Kristian Levring and Søren Kragh-Jacobsen . Although he used handheld cameras and no additional light or filters for filming , he did without other restrictions such as the unity of the place. The script was written within four days. Without having it checked, von Trier immediately went into the production phase. Von Trier rehearsed intimate and taboo emotional states with his actors until they showed the affect he intended. He edited the footage from over 130 hours in such a way that as much “energy” as possible was put into each sequence .

Reviews

The film premiered on May 20, 1998 at the Cannes Film Festival , where von Trier was represented for the fourth time in the Palme d' Or competition after The Element of Crime (1984), Europe (1991) and Breaking the Waves (1996) . Idiots got mostly bad reviews. The French daily Le Monde compared the figure of Karen with that of Bess from Breaking the Waves and the ten “arbitrary” dogma rules with an absurd bet that Von Trier would have imposed. Françoise Maupin ( Le Figaro ) refused to comment on the film in her review and described the Dogma films as "a new Scandinavian wave that is heralding itself even more radically than ours thirty years ago."

The German-language press made a similar statement about the film. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung described idiots as a "nuisance" . "With shaky hand-held camera, clumsy humor, an obligatory sex orgy and the tired old message that the madman normal and the philistines are mistaken, the film had again repeated uncritically as the work of an incorrigible Achtundsechzigers, all embarrassments of the past." When " film-dienst Von Trier's directorial work describes the conceptually and thematically cumbersome film . "Here, too, the director peers out between the images and will be pleased with the film-critical egg dances that his film will certainly provoke." The Neue Zürcher Zeitung expressed itself more positively , which Von Trier's intended amateurism as a result of his "actually almost fundamentalist adherence to the ' Dogma 'rules ” . The authenticity of the fiction, its semi-documentary reality character, would be reinforced in particular by the figure of the Karen. “'Die Idioten' would not, however, be the work of Lars von Trier, this master of (self-) irony, if the film did not destroy the aforementioned closeness to the emotional state of the characters, the illusion of immediacy to the events in the film. This can be seen most clearly in the short interviews, which are scattered between the individual idiot episodes from the start. ” Tobias Kniebe ( Süddeutsche Zeitung ) described the film as an “ original liberation ” that “ both disappoints and satisfies ” expectations . "In its best moments, the film is funny, shocking and revealing at the same time, then again it comes very close to real idiocy," says Kniebe.

At the beginning of August 1998 the film censorship in Norway released an unabridged film with group sex scenes for the first time, with idiots , because the scene would integrate "naturally" , while the Norwegian film distribution in around half of the 22 countries in which the Film had been sold, expected censorship restrictions. The Norwegian media celebrated the release as a historic breakthrough, as it was the first time that images of "hard sex" were allowed.

Awards

Idioten received an invitation to the competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 1998 , where von Trier competed for the Palme d' Or with his film , but in contrast to Thomas Vinterberg's Das Fest, it was not awarded a prize. In the same year the film competed unsuccessfully in the competition of the Spanish film festival Semana Internacional de Cine de Valladolid and at the European Film Awards ceremony (script nomination for Von Trier), but won the FIPRESCI Prize at the London Film Festival . In 1999 leading actress Bodil Jørgensen and supporting actors Anne Louise Hassing and Nikolaj Lie Kaas were awarded the Bodil , Denmark's most important film prize. In the same year Jørgensen also received the Robert for Best Actress .

Web links

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ cf. Idiots In: The great TV feature film film lexicon (CD-ROM). Directmedia Publ., 2006. - ISBN 978-3-89853-036-1
  2. ↑ a b cf. Critique by Hans Messias in film-dienst 08/1999 (accessed on August 27, 2009 via Munzinger Online)
  3. ↑ a b cf. Find the "inner idiot" in you . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, April 16, 1999, p. 67
  4. ↑ cf. Blumenfeld, Samuel: Les mille et une manières de jouer au débile dans un village . In: Le Monde, May 22, 1998 (accessed via LexisNexis Wirtschaft)
  5. ↑ cf. Maupin, Françoise: Les Idiots: Débilisation danoise . In: Le Figaro, May 20, 1998 (accessed via LexisNexis Wirtschaft)
  6. ↑ cf. First the face is sad, then it glows again . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 25, 1998, p. 41
  7. ↑ cf. Kniebe, Tobias: glamor and memory . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 23, 1998, No. 117, p. 15
  8. ↑ cf. Hard sex allowed . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , August 5, 1998, No. 178, p. 11