Europe Endless - Scandinavia: Europa (Dir Lars Von Trier, 1h58m, 1991)

This is a journey into the heart of Europe, an odyssey across European cinema. Over the next four months we will criss-cross the continent, from the Arctic to the Mediterranean, and from the border of Asia to the Atlantic, consider directors who need to be better known outside their nation and titans of cinema, and films ranging from the Post-War period to recent releases. I hope you'll join me on these travels across cinema, and what it can tell us both about Europe, and how it views itself through a camera lens. What better place to start than in Denmark, with Lars Von Trier's blackly comic noir descent into 1945 Germany - on rails - in the final of his Europe Trilogy, 1991's Europa.

Part of the aim of this season is to consider national cinemas that I've previously left uncovered; thus, Danish cinema has an early dominance in silent cinema, with Theodore Dreyer, previously discussed with The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), and early horror pioneer, Benjamin Christensen, director of the infamous witch-centric documentaryha Haxen (The Witch, 1922), through the noirish and serious 1940s, into a - politely speaking - mild mania for softcore titillation in the 1970s, the arrival of a young director called Lars von Trier in the late 1980s and 1990s alongside Thomas Vinterberg, whilst in the 2000s, director Susanne Bier would introduce the world to actors like Mads Mikkelsen & Ulrich Thomsen. 

Von Trier as of late has developed something of an reputation - to be fair, given his conduct at Cannes when Europa was denied a Palme d'Or, middle-fingering the jury as he stormed out, he's always had a degree of an enfant terriblé sensibility - but peel back 35 years of Dogme 95 and one is left with a film maker who largely lets their films speak for themselves. Europa is a film primarily driven on rail, and by dreamlike imagery, and by the battered form of Europe itself; forming the third part of the "Europa" trilogy, the trio of films connected by a noirish atmosphere, black comedic situations, and a continent in crisis. 

On Rails: Europa considers Germany after the Second World War as a cross-section of a train's passengers

Europa begins with these rails, flicking past the camera for three minutes, like blank film leader, as Max Von Sydow's omniscient narrator hypnotically intones - another element the three films share - that "you will be in Europa". Where are these tracks leading? Where are we going? Into Europa, certainly - the continent runs on its rail connections, and, perhaps appropriately, this season also takes its name from the continental preoccupation with trains, for which, again, the Germans figure strongly, being the opening track of Kraftwerk's "Trans-Europe Express" -  but Von Trier invokes the horrors of the Second World War and the shattered, divided, Germany of its aftermath, a spectre of guilt that haunts the film, and many of its German characters. 

The train itself is Germany -we see it towed out of its sidings by teams of workers, that brings to mind via its score from Joachim Holbek, and its quasi-epic scale, like something out of DeMille- and we later travel through it, from the rich in their sleeping car, to the third class where people are crammed in, and where the remnants of the Nazis plot, into nightmarish visions of the trains to Auschwitz and the other camps. Where are these tracks leading? We certainly know where they've led the train of Germany.  Into ruin. This enters the figure of Leopold Kessler (Jean-Marc Barr), soon employed, via his neurotic and detail-obsessed uncle, on the sleeping cars of the vaguely sinister Zentropa. Here he meets the daughter of its founder, Katharina (Barbara Sukowa)  and slowly falls in love with her.

 Around them gather the remnants of Post-War Germany, and those picking over them; such a man of wreckage is Kessler's uncle, who drifts between drunken sleep and maniacal observance of Zentropa's regulations even when dealing with matters of life or death. One way of the nation dealing with itself, at least. We are introduced, in their bombed out mansion, to the Hartmann family, headed by Max, (Jørgen Reenberg) and his son (Udo Kier), the patriarch of the household haunted, and to a degree in denial about what his trains were used for by the Nazis, his obsession signified by a intricate train set that echoes his grip on Germany's rail system and is - symbolically - destroyed in a later scene. He, like Germany is essentially trapped. On one side is what he's already done, in the form of collusion with the Americans, represented by Eddie Constantine's soft spoken but commanding colonel, who engineers a way for Max to wash his hands of being a member of the Party.

"You Love Her" -  Katharina (Barbara Sukowa) is as much cypher for Germany as femme fatale seducer, 

 On the other, the vicious form of the Nazi partisans of Werwolf, who have already threatened Max via letters about Katharina, and whose actions against the Americans and their German collaborators, so often found on Max's trains, grow ever more violent and their presence in Post-War Germany more insidious as the film progresses down its inevitable tracks, and Leopold finds himself ultimately confronted by the same choice as Max. Where are these tracks leading? Deeper into Europa, and with it, the film is as much a noir about America in Germany, through the growing relationship between Leopold and Katharina, between ourselves, the unwitting subject and the hypnotic pull of Europa, entranced by the country itself. Kat is Europa, or more accurately Germany, almost a pastiche of Dietrich, the femme fatale as manifestation of a weary populace, that threaten to at once lull the hapless American deeper into the trance of Europe, and to destroy him.

That this is played as much for bleak comedy, their relationship almost Von Trier and co writer Niels Vørsel's idea of a parody of a noir, the breathless encounters, the meeting between the couple in Munich, until the duo whisk the carpet from under him and leave him...well, in Europa. There is something puckish; the hypnosis, as Howard Hampton's essay for the film's Criterion release notes, as much bedtime story, to begin dreams of a Europe that never was, on Zentropa's trainset of Germany. as it is a film that acts as Post-War nightmare, Von Trier grinning in, provocatively, to remind us that we know where these trains have been, and what they have carried, even if Zentropa and its owners, and Germany itself is in denial. 

Against this, Von Trier and his trio of cinematographers (Henning Bendtsen, Edward Kłosiński and Jean-Paul Meurisse) create the dream: there are too many fine shots to talk about, Von Trier's film matching black and white, colour, back projections, and montage, but one of the most striking shots, arguably homaged in Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (1993) is the Zentropa train passing before a pair of colossal eyes, the noir writ large - hardly surprising the film had over 200 pages of storyboards - whilst elsewhere the murder of a town's mayor is done in cleverly overlaid gunman shooting at an oversized version of his victim on a back projection. As for the film's usage of colour and black and white, sometimes moving between the two in the same sequence, if not the same shot, colour bleeding - in one stark moment it very much is bleeding to highlight the vividity of an ominously arriving bloodied water under a bathroom door, but it is as much a trick to remind us this noirish world is full of flesh and blood people as it is armed with any greater significance. 

Deeper into Europa: much of the film's visual identity is composed of black and white against colour imagery, and backprojection

All of it adds to the dream, a dream we arguably cannot escape, Leopold cannot escape, Germany cannot escape. The film exists on hallucinatory dream logic, yes, but it is as much a nightmare, one in which its hapless hero is trapped between the violence of what has been, in the form of Werwolf, and the horrors of the Second World War, and what will be, in an Allied-occupied Germany. There is no escape from this train, this barrelling towards Leopold and the nation he finds himself' in 's reckoning, and these tracks only lead towards one destination, as Von Trier rounds out his hallucinatory trilogy in grand style. Onward, into the dream, the nightmare, of Europa.

Rating: Highly Recommended

Europa is available on Blu-Ray from Criterion and on streaming from AppleTV

Next week, we travel to Sweden, to taste Ingmar Bergmann's bittersweet road movie, Wild Strawberries