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Dec 05, 2014Nursebob rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
Wanting to make the world a slightly better place Leopold Kessler, the American son of a German expat, travels back to his father’s homeland shortly after WWII in order to work. Meeting up with his uncle, a gruff and taciturn old goat who dislikes Americans as much as he mistrusts Germans, Leopold lands a job as a first class sleeping car conductor where he meets and falls in love with Katharina, the railway owner’s enigmatic daughter. But despite his desire to “show Germany a little kindness”, Katharina’s shady connections to the underground partisan movement eventually bring about a crisis of conscience in Leopold when he is forced to make a moral decision between two equally repugnant options. Filmed in hallucinatory B&W with occasional splashes of grainy colour, and using a variety of gaudy cinematic conceits from rear projection to macabre montages, Lars von Trier’s unflattering examination of Germany’s post-war mindset looks like the brainchild of Guy Maddin and David Lynch after the two had shared a few lines of coke. With Kafkaesque sets and dialogue centred on rules, regulations, and conformity, von Trier presents a defeated nation scrambling over its own ruins while bowing meekly to the Allied forces which now control it. Trains, always a powerful metaphor, are used to great effect here whether it be a couple destroying a toy railroad set with their desperate copulating or Leopold’s own train, formally employed at Auschwitz, now refurbished with carefully segregated compartments: wealthy industrialists and military brass to the front, huddling peasants in the middle, and a makeshift concentration camp in the rear where emaciated inmates stare blankly from behind iron bars and chickenwire. And despite the faux elegance of its first class accommodations, the tattered curtains and grimy windows reveal nothing but passing scenes of death and destruction. Finally, as if to overlay an element of dark psychodrama, Max von Sydow’s grim voiceover plays hypnotist to our hapless protagonist’s sad struggles. A dystopian mindf*ck and a fine example of what von Trier was capable of before he went off the deep end.