Christopher Webster [DVD News 09.24.08] movie news dvd



Before polarizing audiences in America for martyrizing his female characters in Dancer in the Dark, Dogville, and Maderlay, Danish filmmaker, and founder of the famous Dogme 95 movement, Lars Vontrier, made a number of trippy Kafkaesque features that I personally find much more interesting than his American output. Criterion has released a couple of these films in the past (like Element of Crime) but since I've yet to see Europa, I'm pretty excited for it's double disc release on th eboutique label in December. The DVD will feature a bevy of documentaries, both past a new, on the production as well as a new commentary featuring Lars von Trier and producer Peter Aalbæk Jensen. Trailer and synopsis after the break.

Synopsis:
"You will now listen to my voice . . . On the count of ten you will be in Europa . . ." So begins Max von Sydow's opening narration to Lars von Trier’s hypnotic Europa (known in the U.S. as Zentropa), a fever dream in which American pacifist Leopold Kessler (Jean-Marc Barr) stumbles into a job as a sleeping-car conductor for the Zentropa railways in a Kafkaesque 1945 postwar Frankfurt. With its gorgeous black-and-white and color imagery and meticulously recreated (if then nightmarishly deconstructed) costumes and sets, Europa is one of the great Danish filmmaker’s weirdest and most wonderful works, a runaway train ride to an oddly futuristic past.




Pre-order Europa from Amazon

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Anonymous (10 years ago) Reply

This is great news, though i like Element of Crime better...

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