"My goal was to go back to basics and find the joy of believing in a story no matter what," says Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier about his latest project, "Dogville." "If someone tells you a story, you have to make an effort to believe in it.
"And when you do, it can really be good."
That the experience can also be perverse, exhilarating, explosively un-P.C. and unforgettable, it goes without saying. "The sad tale of the township of Dogville," told in nine chapters and a prologue, is the handiwork of possibly the most controversial European anti-auteur.
Von Trier is on the phone from picturesque Trollhattan, Sweden, where he just started shooting his next film, "Manderlay." He likes to make movies in sets of three, and "Dogville" is the first in what he has referred to as his American trilogy.
The director is reluctant to make interpretation easy, either. "I like films to raise questions that people will then have to answer themselves. Even I am not really sure what particular theme connects them. Why make films if you're sure?"
"Dogville," opening in Los Angeles theaters this week, can be read as a Depression-era allegory about the shabby back side of a purported American Utopia. The credits sequence juxtaposes, with cheerful rudeness, David Bowie's buoyantly ironic anthem "Young Americans" against Dorothea Lange's iconic photographs of poverty, for instance. Later, "Dogville's" omniscient narrator observes that a character "made up for his lack of preparation by lashing out haphazardly in all directions." In such moments, Von Trier makes it impossible not to see which country he's skewering.
It shows considerable cheek on the part of an artist who has famously never set foot in the United States. (He suffers from a fear of flying, as well as other phobias that appear as recurring themes in his work.) "You can criticize me for this, but I have a tendency to be inspired by things that I'm not really familiar with and that are quite remote," the filmmaker says. "It's much easier that way. You don't have to work so much doing research -- I already had a remote idea about how America could be -- but of course, you can make a lot of people angry."
And for some, nothing will be more offensive than the sight of Grace, the film's protagonist, played with hair-raising abandon by Hollywood megastar Nicole Kidman, spending a fair stretch of the story shackled to a diabolical leash-like contraption and being repeatedly raped.
