A group of nonconformers battle the status quo in Lars von Trier’s The Idiots
THE IDIOTS (IDIOTERNE) (Lars von Trier, 1998)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Opens Friday, June 16
metrograph.com
mubi.com
I remember being fairly disgusted the first time I saw Lars von Trier’s 1998 film, The Idiots, about a group of men and women who pretend to be mentally ill in order to subvert bourgeois society. They “spass about,” going to restaurants, bars, a factory, a pool, and people’s homes and act like “retards” (their word, not mine), dribbling from their mouths, talking with speech impediments, and moving as if they have cerebral palsy. They pull off pranks that range from just plain silly to downright offensive, with no regret or apology. The film was booed at Cannes, then nominated for the Palme d’Or, while reviews praised and reviled it. However, over time, its reputation has grown, with more and more critics raving about its ingenuity and inventiveness.
The Idiots is the second Dogme 95 film, and von Trier’s only such movie, following a set of ten principles involving sound, light, acting, camera use, genre, location, and other elements, aiming for naturalism and immediacy without technical virtuosity. In the “Vow of chastity,” each filmmaker “swears as a director to refrain from personal taste! I am no longer an artist. I swear to refrain from creating a ‘work,’ as I regard the instant as more important than the whole. My supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by all the means available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations.”
The film is now back in a twenty-fifth anniversary 4K remaster that on the surface would appear to violate at least the spirit of those rules. Opening at Metrograph on June 16 before streaming on MUBI, The Idiots still challenges good taste, but it’s more difficult to merely dismiss it as some kind of goof gone wrong as the political correctness of the 1990s evolves into the wokeism of the 2020s. However, it’s hard to imagine that it’s not profoundly offensive to the disabled community. Are we allowed to think that some of the inanity is funny in this blackest of black comedies? I let out one belly laugh that shook my body, but I grimaced a lot more than I smiled.
Stoffer (Jens Albinus) is the ersatz leader of this group of misfits, which includes Susanne (Anne Louise Hassing), Henrik (Troels Lyby), Jeppe (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), Josephine (Louise Mieritz), Ped (Henrik Prip), Miguel (Luis Mesonero), Axel (Knud Romer Jørgensen), Nana (Trine Michelsen), and Katrine (Anne-Grethe Bjarup Riis), who have left their boring, materialistic, conventional lives as doctors, advertising executives, and parents in order to challenge the status quo. After pulling a stunt at a fancy restaurant in part to skip out on the bill, they are joined by Karen (Bodil Jørgensen), a quiet woman who seems lost in the world; she is essentially the cinematic representative of the audience, wondering if what they’re doing is disgraceful, exciting, or important.
A key exchange takes place in the woods, about twenty minutes into the film:
Karen: Why do they do it?
Nana: That’s a bloody good question.
Stoffer: They’re searching for their inner idiot, Karen. What’s the idea of a society that gets richer and richer when it doesn’t make anyone happier? In the stone age, all the idiots died. It doesn’t have to be like that nowadays. Being an idiot is a luxury, but it is also a step forward. Idiots are the people of the future. If one can find the one idiot that happens to be one’s own idiot. . . .
Karen: But there are people who really are ill. It’s sad for the people who are not able like us. How can you justify acting the idiot?
Stoffer: You can’t.
Karen: I would just like to . . . understand.
Stoffer: Understand what?
Karen: Why I’m here. Why I am here.
Stoffer: Perhaps because there is a little idiot in there — that wants to come out and have some company. Don’t you think?
The Idiots have taken up residence in a large house owned by Stoffer’s uncle, Svend (Erik Wedersøe), who is trying to sell it and is thus pretty unenthusiastic about how his home is being ransacked. Even a local councilman (Michael Moritzen) stops by to see just what the hell is going on. But that doesn’t stop them from continuing their exploits, although the plot heats up when Stoffer insists that some of them go back to their actual lives and still “spass” out. “Either you’re an idiot or you aren’t,” Stoffer proclaims. Editor Molly Malene Stensgaard occasionally cuts to several of the Idiots on a couch as if they are on a reality show, discussing something that went wrong but skirting around the details.
Perhaps the most important statement is made by Axel, who announces with disdain at a turning point, “Here comes reality.”
The 110-minute film features plenty of nudity (including an orgy scene with close-ups of penetration by unidentified porn actors), multiple scenes where the boom mic is visible, and even a shot in which we can see von Trier in a window reflection, holding the camera. There’s also incidental music, which Dogme 95 generally disallows, but von Trier has Kim Kristensen play Camille Saint-Saëns’s “The Swan” on the melodica live, just out of visible range, so it was deemed acceptable.
Twenty-five years later, I’ve come to terms with the film. While I can endorse such other controversial von Trier projects as Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Zentropa, Dogville, The Element of Crime, Nymphomaniac, Melancholia, and Antichrist — many of which are now available on MUBI — I can’t unequivocally recommend The Idiots, but there is much more to it than I initially wanted to realize. It is still offensive; the disabled and young people brought up to be aware of the rights of the disabled especially might not appreciate the use of some of the language, highlighted by a word that recently popped up in songs by Beyoncé and Lizzo that they both had to apologize for and replace with an alternate lyric.
But in a world of vast income inequality, critical issues with mental health, viciousness on social media, and cancel culture, The Idiots now feels more radical than ever, with a deeply emotional, unforgettable finale.
“Idiocy is like hypnosis or ejaculation: If you want it, you can’t have it — and if you don’t want it, you can,” von Trier, whose parents both worked for the social ministry, told journalist Peter Øvig Knudsen about the film, which is meant to provoke. And provoke it still does, a quarter century after its debut.