ZENTROPA Movie Review

Just after World War II, an American and self-proclaimed pacifist named Leopold finds himself working as a sleeping-car conductor on a huge German railway system called Zentropa. He wants to take part in the post-war rebuilding of Germany, or so he claims, and this is what he comes up with. The railroad—now carrying ordinary passengers but until recently carrying Jews to the ovens—is run by the creepy Max Hartmann, who would like Leo and everyone else to believe that he was only following orders. Max's sexy daughter Katharina (Barbara Sukowa) has designs on Leo, but an American agent (Eddie Constantine) has designs on Max; he'd like to arrest him for war crimes. This could be the plot description of any number of mediocre European thrillers, but whatever Lars von Trier's Zentropa is, it's not mediocre. I first encountered the picture at a Museum of Modern Art screening—it was part of a superb exhibition the Department of Film mounted in 1991 called Junction and Journey: Trains and Film. The experience of watching the film reminded me a bit of the first time I saw Orson Welles's Touch of Evil; not because Zentropa's in the same league, exactly (it's not), but because at some point I realized that I had lost track of the plot but was mesmerized anyway. I recall staring at the slow, dark, stylized widescreen images and muttering under my breath: “What the hell is this?” I'm still not sure. But if this was von Trier's way of getting noticed, of announcing his arrival on the film scene in a flamboyant way, he succeeded. Von Trier won the Best Director award at Cannes for Zentropa (it was originally called Europa, but retitled because of the impending release of Agnieszka Holland's Europa, Europa. One could only imagine the two films side by side at a multiplex: “One ticket, please.” “For Europa! Or Europa, Europa?”). Zentropa sank almost unnoticed beneath the distribution waves in the U.S., but von Trier resurfaced with a far bigger splash in his beguiling Breaking the Waves.

NEXT STOP … The Kingdom, Parts I & II, Alphaville, Veronika Voss

1992 (R) 112m/C GE Jean-Marc Barr, Barbara Sukowa, Udo Kier, Eddie Constantine; D: Lars von Trier; W: Niels Vorsel, Lars von Trier. VHS, LV, Closed Caption TOU