Climbing Mount Criterion XXII

On to #80...

Film:

The Element of Crime (1984)

Director:

Lars von Trier

Feeling disengaged from Dogville (too many heavy-handed metaphors) and angry at Dancer in the Dark (if you don't like human beings, why make movies about them?), I hoped there'd be a little less contempt in The Element of Crime; I figured that von Trier needed a few years to whip himself into his patented froth. True enough, there's a sort of puppyish concession to noir cliches--The Third Man most obviously--and there's an appropriate, appealing stylishness to the way he tweaks noir aesthetics. Instead of bleak shadows, he goes for a sepia, almost jaundiced color scheme, with lots of rain misting the proceedings and pitter-patting through the story. Which is pretty mundane, unfortunately--the hard-boiled dick (Michael Elphick) who goes native in the midst of his investigation is hackneyed stuff, and turning the femme fatale (Me Me Lai) into an Asian whore instead of a seductress is less creative than von Trier and his cohorts probably thought it was. But the surface pleasure of noir are still there in those shadowy, rainy, double-exposed scenes--the notion that getting at the truth requires navigating a whole lot of muck.