(Ed. Note: This was originally published at Image Facts.)
For some reason I never got around to a full-length review of Dogville. The film generated so many rabbit trails and hit so remarkably close to home on a number of points I thought I would spare any readers the agony of wading through my muddled thoughts on it. If anything, Dogville should be voted in somewhere as having the most inspired choice for “Song Playing During the Final Credits.” When David Bowie’s “Young Americans” starts playing and the veil drops on the horrible story of this mythical American small town, one can feel tumblers clicking as if a key has been turned in the lock. Whether one agrees or not with von Trier’s overt suspicion of America, one can’t deny that he has argued his case in an unforgettable way.
In Dogville, von Trier trades his typically expressionist approach for something much more sterile, even what theater critics would call Brechtian. Gone are the wild pans and natural camerawork of everything else he has done. Dogville takes place completely on a sound stage with its entire set only marked out in taped lines on the floor. The actors simply pretend that the walls, doors, and streets of the set exist, and the viewer is afforded complete access to the entire town and its residents at all times. Alternating between overhead and theatrical points of view, this town begins to take on an engaging realism of its own.
In the film, Grace stumbles upon a small American town while fleeing from a number of Great Depression-era gangsters hard on her heels. What she finds is “Our Town,” a community of cardboard cutouts of the American ideal. They take her in as one of their own until they find out who she really is, and then the story contorts itself into a horrific series of tragedies on a truly von Trier scale. I have a hard time with von Trier’s ridiculous politics at times, and certainly we could critique his hypocritical depiction of the American spirit, but it is easy to miss the forest for the trees here. Dogville is packed with unforgettable moments of clarity and grace (and Grace), and while its critique of American politics is becoming more and more timely, its exploration of Law and Grace is timeless.
Shot completely on DV, the numerous overhead shots are actually composites of a number of simultaneous cameras running in a grid above the sound stage. During editing, the lines of gradation that would occur in the overlap between these cameras were carefully camouflaged. As the film rolls on, some of the fine detailed work needed to turn all of these cameras into a unified frame begins to break down. We are left with what begins to appear as a subtle patchwork of basic tones; what seemed to be whole and crystal clear starts to abstract itself. This technical process seems quite pointed. Von Trier has crafted a film that becomes a substantial visual metaphor for the themes of the film itself, as it begins to break down and degrade itself in the same way that this entire town has fallen from grace by the end.