9/5/2023 0 Comments The house that jack built“I’m not a man of faith,” says Jack, before stating that such a declaration is “totally crazy, considering our present situation”. ![]() Just how far his tongue is in his cheek is debatable. Photograph: Allstar/Zentropa Entertainmentsįrom the bells ringing in heaven at the end of Breaking the Waves to a tableau-vivant evocation of Eugène Delacroix’s La Barque de Dante (aka Dante and Virgil in Hell) here, Von Trier’s films have long occupied an explicitly theological universe. Uma Thurman with Matt Dillon in The House That Jack Built. ![]() Make no mistake, like Dante’s depiction of the inferno, The House That Jack Built is a comedy, albeit far from divine. The murders are a byproduct of these compulsive tendencies, and Jack seems more interested in the process of cleaning up afterwards, although a scene in which he can’t leave the house of a victim for fear that he missed a spot raises grim chuckles, of which there are several. For years, he’s been designing, building, destroying and then rebuilding a house that never meets his OCD expectations. Intercut with the murders, we see footage of the pianist Glenn Gould (“he represents art”), and hear Jack expound at length about engineering versus architecture. It all sounds very perfunctory, and that’s largely how it’s played – as distanced and disconnected as the vague 1970s/80s setting. Next, we have the strangling of a middle-aged woman (Siobhan Fallon Hogan), the hunting of a mother (Sofie Gråbøl) and her kids, and the butchery of a woman whom Jack calls “Simple” (Riley Keough). She tells Jack he looks like a serial killer, and she’s right from the Dennis Nilsen glasses to the killing-for-company taxidermy tendencies, he’s an almost parodic textbook creep. In the first, Uma Thurman plays an unnamed stranded driver who falls foul of a broken jack (pun surely intended) after breaking down on a remote road. As the two journey into darkness, Jack recounts five randomly defining “incidents” from his life. Here, Matt Dillon’s titular serial killer drones on to his initially unseen companion Verge (Bruno Ganz), who warns him not to “believe you’re going to tell me something I haven’t heard before”. In Nymph omaniac, a woman recounted her self-proclaimed sexual wickedness to an apparently sympathetic man, proudly demanding damnation. Jack seems more interested in the process of cleaning up afterwards ![]() Von Trier has suggested that this may be his final film, and you can certainly read it as a sort of last will and testament, with an audaciously ridiculous metaphysical punchline. But the prevailing atmosphere of The House That Jack Built is one of sardonic, self-reflexive disdain. It’s easy to bridle at Von Trier’s films, particularly when they feature moments of New York Ripper-style gore, button-pushing provocations (“Children, the most sensitive subject of all!” says one character), duckling mutilation (nb: no animals were harmed), and grotesque human sculptures that resemble the shock-art of the Chapman brothers. Asked how he felt about the reaction to his impressively grotesque latest, he deadpanned: “I’m not sure if they hated it enough.” “That’s OK,” he replied, “as long as you really hated it!” I remembered that comment when reading Von Trier’s response to the walkouts that greeted The House That Jack Built when it premiered at Cannes in May. ![]() I told him how much I liked Anti-Christ and Melancholia, while also confessing that I absolutely hated The Idiots. I n 2011, I interviewed Lars von Trier at his Zentropa offices in Denmark.
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