Viviana Ponchia
He had two wives and inspirations at will, from Charlotte Gainsbourg to Björk, from Kirsten Dunst to Nicole Kidman. He took and sifted through women to make each film a torment, a concentration of phobias and pains. They called him a misogynist, he answered: and Strindberg? To say that the struggle of the sexes matters. And now the most daring and brilliant director, a provocateur who managed to be kicked out of the Cannes Film Festival for apologizing to Hitler, a hypochondriac a hundred times more mechanical than Woody Allen, who discovered Parkinson’s disease last year, he, an inimitable Dane, made another of their own.
A video on Instagram without even knowing what a social network is. The dove says exactly the following, because it would be blasphemous to paraphrase: “Lars von Trier is looking for a muse girl. I don’t know what I got myself into this time. something straight. I am 67 years old. I suffer from Parkinson’s disease, obsessive compulsive disorder and alcoholism which is now under control. In short, with any luck, I might still have a few decent movies up my sleeve. All of this, as suggested, comes from an old-fashioned personal ad in which, knowing absolutely nothing about social media, I’m looking for a barra muse girlfriend. And despite all the whining, I still insist on believing that, and in the right company, I can be a pretty exciting partner. All applications for this ad should be sent to: bill.mrk.lars@gmail.com. And thank you all for your endless patience.”
Muse. Who feels ready for this? The Muses live in Boeotia and play on the grass with water lilies, the poets who call upon them ask for sacrifices: Clio the inspirer of history, Euterpe the merry fellow, Thalia the festive, Melpomene the singer, Tersichora the dancer, Erato the instigator of nostalgia, Urania the heavenly, Polynya is full of hymns, Beautiful-voiced Calliope. Need a muse. Dante had Beatrice, Petrarch Laura, the dissolute Boccaccio fell in love with Fiammetta, Leopardi thought of Silvia, D’Annunzio yearned for Duse, Nietzsche for Lou von Salome, Picasso for Dora Maar and a thousand others (Francoise Gilot was the only one who dared to leave From him). Today, Lars von Trier is forced to turn to the Internet. The only one is to step forward without fear, since he already has it as a vision of the world (“Artists must suffer, the result is better”). And there is no point in guessing whether this is a joke or a cry for help. The role is free, a man is waiting there.
The caveat is that you must pass the quiz. And that no one is saved. Let whoever wants to come forward and touch all the manifestations of human baseness in order to understand us not Snow White, but Grimilda. One who, however, must have a lot of patience to slip into the demanding program of one who considers himself the greatest living director (“even my colleagues think of themselves that way, but don’t talk about it”). Several headings can define the degree of risk.
It is no coincidence that in the beginning (1988) there was Medea, an archetype who kills her own children to punish the horns that Jason suffered. And Breaking the Waves (1996)? A simple girl (Emily Watson) is persuaded by her crippled husband to prostitute every stranger in order to revive sex for him, which he can no longer have. Dancer in the Dark (2000) offers no glimmer of hope for human nature: a worker about to go blind (singer Björk, who accused him of sexual harassment seventeen years later), with his son at risk of blindness, is deceived by a man who stole all her money for the operation and is sentenced to death for a crime she did not commit. And the claustrophobic Dogville, filmed entirely in a barn (2003), where Kidman is chased by fellow villagers and forced into cathartic revenge. Or the Antichrist (2009), the first chapter of the Depression Trilogy, full of hallucinations in the forest (Gainsbourg suffers the death of her young son, who fell out of the window while she was making love to Willem Dafoe). And again Melancholia (2011) where there is even a planet on the way of collision with the Earth, Wagner soundtrack, the ending is obvious. To Get to the Nymphomaniac (2013): Didactically the story of a nymphomaniac surrounded by men who use her.
By this time, someone will change their mind, some applications will already be withdrawn. Perhaps the 2011 bombing in Cannes comes to mind: “I understand Hitler. He did a lot of wrong things, absolutely, but I can imagine him sitting in his bunker, and in the end, yes, I sympathize a little.” Or an interview in which he admitted that he wrote most of his films under the influence of alcohol and drugs, but that he eventually sobered up, allowing himself only one bottle of vodka a day. Okay, this is a jump into the dark. But this is still the man who created the Dogme 95 movement to counter special effects and the billion dollar investment in movies. About the talented loser who had the guts to say, “Perhaps the only difference between me and other people is that I always asked for more at sunset.”