Lars von Trier

The three films of 'Lars von Trier's Europa Trilogy' feel unmistakably like the works of someone who had yet to truly find their own voice.

Fans are likely to prefer Stig Bjorkman’s Tranceformer: A Portrait of Lars von Trier and the Europa making-of featurette above all else, whereas skeptics are directed to sample Bo Green Jensen’s 2005 interview with the director, where, so far as we’re concerned, his 20-20 hindsight is very much astute. There’s nothing new here, aside from an expanded version of critic Howard Hampton’s (reliably pugnacious) booklet essay, which assesses the “Europa Trilogy” as a glorious mess that’s always teetering on the edge of self-destruction, which in Hampton’s world is an unmitigated compliment. Presented almost as an alien declassified document from a universe where filmmaking only serves to comment upon the act of filmmaking, the 1987 film finds von Trier turning the camera on himself as he and collaborators work to bang out a story about a plague. While decorum would suggest that you veer toward the ones that don’t feature Lars von Trier, the truth of the matter is he’s still an entertaining gadfly and, if we were to pick a personal favorite, it would be the one he shares with Peter Aalbæk Jensen on Europa. Especially in the case of von Trier, whose entire career has been an object lesson in opposition—opposition to propriety, opposition to decorum, opposition to taste. It would be a neat trick if it weren’t patently clear that everything that The Element of Crime attempts was profoundly bested by Michael Mann’s “getting inside the mind of a killer” masterpiece