The action is cleverly constructed and strongly played, shorter and sharper than Dogville with some sort of focus to it - however questionably intentioned. It is a better film than Dogville in fact it is the film he should have made instead of Dogville. Filled with righteous disgust and a do-gooding compulsion to meddle, Grace moves in and enforces enlightened justice with the help of her dad's gun-toting mobsters: the black servants are to get proper share-ownership and democracy under her benign guidance. Those who saw the previous film will remember how Grace (played this time by Howard) was cast out from the smoking ruins of her last dystopia she has now arrived with her glowering father (Willem Dafoe) at Manderlay, a secluded cotton plantation, in which the imperious mistress, played by Lauren Bacall, has neglected to tell the black servants that slavery was abolished 60 years before.

It is conceived on exactly the same Brechtian filmed-theatre basis as the first film Dogville, acted out on a sound-stage with streets and buildings represented by floor markings. He does this in Manderlay by implying not merely that America's white liberal condescension is just a new form of slave-mastery but also that black Americans are complicit in their own oppression. Nobody, but nobody, in the history of the world, has ever cared less about the American slaves than our snickering maestro Von Trier.Īs ever, his mission is to vex and embarrass the United States. And after watching this mischievous, ingenious film, one fact shines out.

(Try doing some cartoons about Islam, Lars!) Here is the second film in his projected Dogville trilogy about the headstrong daughter of a 1930s gangster, a role Bryce Dallas Howard has now taken over from Nicole Kidman. H e's back, that maverick madcap from Denmark: Lars von Trier, intent on annoying us all.

Manderlay 2005 rapidshare