The Idiots

Breaking the Waves, the film that made the names of both director Lars von Trier and Emily Watson, was a melodramatic pseudo-documentary (think hand-held camera work) that turned out to be a film about God. Furthermore, all those stunning backdrops of the Scottish landscape that introduced each chapter also self-importantly hailed the director as some omnipotent, omniscient force overseeing the film world within. But while a certain moral ambiguity gave most of Breaking the Waves an air of authority, the ambiguity of von Trier's latest, The Idiots, a bizarre, slight film about a group of articulate slackers who pretend to be mentally retarded, threatens to stifle every shot.

The film opens quite brilliantly with a restaurant scene in which the group's leading "spasser", Stoffer (Jens Albinus), manages to get a free meal by staging a performance that has the waiters throw him and his friends out before he causes too much disruption. Karen (Bodil Jorgensen), is an innocent bystander to this incident but becomes first a passive and then impassioned member of the group. Lars von Trier's jumpy camera and commitment to real rather than artificial sound and lighting gives this scene a comic, but discomforting, edge.

Unfortunately, as one of the first fruits to emerge from the Dogme95 "vow of chastity" approach to film-making, The Idiots has to stick with this tone every minute of its tortured way. Festen, another Dogme movie which came out earlier this year, worked better because its all-night country-house shenanigans were somehow twice as convincing because of how the film was made. Here, the technique feels plain pretentious.

The Idiots is a political film in every sense. It is shamefacedly political about the creative process of making movies, and its subject matter is so overwhelmingly provocative that it prevents either its characters - whose parts are woefully underwritten - or its story from developing. It is self-important throughout in a way that Breaking the Waves was only occasionally. And because of these reasons The Idiots, often a very funny and genuinely challenging picture with serious intent, fails to actually go anywhere. Far too besotted with his idea, von Trier seems to have forgotten about his film.

Reviewed by Douglas McCabe