Dogville

Dogville won no prizes at the Cannes Film Festival but received plenty of praise and a lot of attention, because the auteur Lars von Trier has once again produced a daring cinematic experiment.

The most striking thing about Dogville is that the film's sets consist mainly of chalk lines. The small American provincial town where the entire story takes place is reduced to a minimum of props. Even the dog is just a chalk drawing. In this way the film points to itself as an artefact. The question then is whether the audience can forget this dominant anti-realist element and engage with the characters and the plot. The measured narrator's voice does not exactly encourage involvement either, and a running time of almost three hours is on the long side, but you are nevertheless drawn into the story.

Dogville is set in the 1930s. The protagonist Grace is fleeing from gangsters, and after long deliberation the residents of the remote mountain town of Dogville decide to hide her. Out of gratitude Grace offers her help to the people of the town. At first they are reluctant to accept help from the elegant young woman, who is clearly not used to hard physical work, but it is not long before Grace is allowed to lend a hand in the little homes.

As the townspeople realise how dependent Grace is on their mercy, they begin to exploit her goodness. First she is made to toil like a slave, then on top of that she is raped and humiliated in the grossest way. Even so, Grace tries to see the good in people. In this respect she is related to the female protagonists of "Dancer in the Dark" and "Breaking the Waves". Selma, Bess and Grace are all self-sacrificing women with a somewhat naive belief in the goodness of humanity and an almost superhuman capacity to forgive even the worst crimes. Grace, however, is not cut entirely from the same cloth as Selma and Bess, which actually feels liberating in the film's final sequence.