Man­der­lay

“If there is any town the world would be a lit­tle bet­ter with­out, this is it,” said Grace of her stay in the 1930s town­ship of Dogville. With Man­der­lay, she has had the strange mis­for­tune of stum­bling across anoth­er such place – a Deep South plan­ta­tion where slav­ery is still in prac­tice 70 years after its offi­cial abolition.

How can such bar­bar­ic inhu­man­i­ty be allowed to reign free in a coun­try which holds per­son­al free­dom above all else? Grace unwit­ting­ly makes it her moral oblig­a­tion to reg­u­late this abuse of pow­er and give the democ­ra­cy-starved slaves the free­dom they deserve. What could pos­si­bly go wrong?

Filmed in the bold but bare the­atri­cal aes­thet­ic coined by Berthold Brecht, Man­der­lay is (after Dogville) the sec­ond part of a pro­posed ​‘Amer­i­ca’ tril­o­gy from Lars von Tri­er. Assum­ing the role of Grace from Nicole Kid­man is (rel­a­tive) new­com­er Bryce Dal­las-Howard. She doesn’t bring the same vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty and elec­tric pres­ence to the char­ac­ter as Kid­man, but she does demon­strate a vital­i­ty and ide­al­ism which accom­pa­nies the specifics of this par­tic­u­lar role rather well.

It will come as no sur­prise that Man­der­lay is a film that active­ly seeks to rile its view­er. Very lit­tle room is left for ambi­gu­i­ty in a nar­ra­tive so cal­cu­lat­ed that every line, prop and nuance is bound by a pre­med­i­tat­ed cause and effect con­coct­ed by von Tri­er himself.

This is claus­tro­pho­bic film­mak­ing, rife with sym­bol­ism and an unstop­pable momen­tum. It gives pur­pose to the spar­tan set design, puri­fy­ing the film’s mes­sage and forc­ing a reac­tion from the audi­ence. Emo­tion­al rape or mea­sured sto­ry­telling? The jury is still out.

Of the many idio­syn­crasies that Man­der­lay choos­es to run with, per­haps the most dubi­ous is the sug­ges­tion that the rela­tion­ship between mas­ter and slave was not, in fact, one of acri­mo­ny and deri­sion but benign acqui­es­cence – hell, even love. But there is an expla­na­tion: Man­der­lay is not a film about slavery.

It address­es the com­po­nent of ​‘slav­ery’ inher­ent in all forms of gov­ern­ment; the total­i­tar­i­an­ism imbued with­in so-called enlight­ened democ­ra­cies, and the false notion that there exists an ide­ol­o­gy which sur­mounts racial or class bar­ri­ers. Grace’s smug moral suprema­cy over the sup­posed sub­servience of the slaves also helps the film work as a metaphor for the cur­rent hos­til­i­ties in the Mid­dle East, going fur­ther to sug­gest what might become of the area when the US final­ly decides to pull out.

And that’s the rea­son why you should see this film. While some of the dia­logue may feel over-the­atri­cal and the final twist verges on the ludi­crous, Man­der­lay will, nev­er­the­less, leave you lying awake at night, pon­der­ing the intri­ca­cies of the ethics and morals put to tri­al. It’s a curt, dis­pas­sion­ate and manip­u­la­tive film, but it’s also bold in its assump­tions, emo­tion­al­ly stir­ring and often high­ly amusing.

With Man­der­lay, von Tri­er has cre­at­ed anoth­er ode to the clas­sic Hol­ly­wood film­mak­ing he so obvi­ous­ly reveres, and while his dex­ter­i­ty at fash­ion­ing mor­dant and high­ly provoca­tive films may have reached its apogee a few years ago, it’s still a tes­ta­ment to the fact that von Tri­er at half cock is bet­ter than 99 per cent of most direc­tors fir­ing on all cylinders.