|
The wild kingdom Danish TV hits the big screen by ANNIE ILKOW
Commissioned by Danish TV to do "something fast and cheap," von Trier and co-writer Niels Vørsel make sincere gestures toward straight TV drama. There is a huge cast and intertwining storylines involving romance and hospital politics and while the show walks the walk of conventional drama, it delights in veering off into Pythonesque derangement. It's fun to imagine the story meetings between von Trier and Danish television execs in which he explained the severed head, the Swedish neurosurgeon railing against "Danish scum," the chief pathologist who transplants a diseased liver into himself and the brotherhood of "ducklings," among other oddities. But beneath the comic lurks the cosmic. This show has a seething spookiness of place unparalleled since The Shining. The premise, revealed in a brilliant pre-credit sequence, is a von Trier special. The hospital, nicknamed "the Kingdom" for its size, "rests on ancient marshlands where the bleaching ponds once lay." The bleachers and their cloth have been replaced with doctors and their lab coats but "the signs of fatigue are appearing in the solid modern edifice." With wonderful low-tech creepiness, von Trier imbues the prevailing end-of-millennium spiritual revival with his own special brand of B-movie occultism to critique nothing less than rationality itself. The story is set in motion when patient Mrs. Drusse encounters a ghost crying in the elevator shaft. She and her hapless intern son Bulder uncover the child's brutal history. Elsewhere, a phantom ambulance calls in its arrival every night and disappears. One resident, suspecting his girlfriend is a ghost, explains, "There's a lot of it going around." Two dishwashers with Down's Syndrome act as a Greek chorus. In episode four, all the hilarious and grisly storylines come together in an outrageous finale. Like Twin Peaks before it, The Kingdom mixes low comedy with something verging on the art film. The result makes our most cutting-edge shows seem very dull indeed. The Kingdom plays at the Cinéma Parallèle Fri-Mon, April 11-14 and April 17-20, in Swedish and Danish with English subtitles. See repertory listings for showtimes |
Lars von Trier wraps an enigma inside a mystery inside flaky pastry and comes up with a TV series that may be the best movie currently playing. Originally a four-and-a-half-hour miniseries made for Danish television, The Kingdom is a tweaked hospital melodrama--part parody, part serious and all whacked. Together with von Trier's other works (Europa, Breaking The Waves), watching The Kingdom cements the impression that von Trier is writing his own manual.