The Element of Crime (1984, Lars von Trier) (Patreon)

48/100

Second viewing, last seen...1995! That surprised the hell out of me, as I'd have sworn (and perhaps even been willing to bet a modest sum) that I didn't catch up with Element until well after Von Trier became an arthouse phenom via Breaking the Waves. Turns out it was the second of his films I saw (third if you count The Kingdom), a few years after Zentropa's U.S. theatrical run. Thanks for straightening me out, obsessive film log. Anyway, I didn't much care for this shallow stylistic exercise back when I apparently had little auteurist context for it, and a quarter-century's worth of additional LvT didn't do it any favors. Certainly the sulfurous-yellow look is distinctive, and there are isolated moments during which I appreciate the sheer perversity of setting a noir-ish detective story in something akin to Tarkovsky's forbidding/forbidden Zone. There's a good running joke (?) in which characters seeking to catch their breath lie down upon an unexplained array of scattered sharp objects (scissors, forks), and the cavernous building with beer bottles covering every inch of floor space for no apparent reason remained lodged in my memory for what I hadn't realized was 25 years. But arresting detritus alone can't hold my attention at feature length (should note that Stalker's not among my favorite Tarkovskys), and the narrative here amounts to "On top of that, you explore the notion that cop and criminal are really two aspects of the same person. See every cop movie ever made for other examples of this." Von Trier's skill with actors had yet to manifest itself (though he had sepulchral voiceover down from the jump), and his dialogue is purely functional, so there's just nothing to latch onto other than sodium vapor and production design. And if anyone thinks they can explain the ending to me—what "the dive" has to do with anything (apart from visually rhyming with an earlier shot of a horse being lifted from the water by one leg), why we're looking at a lemur in the final shot—by all means, have at it.