A good movie

Like the other movies directed by Lars von Trier, as usual, I had a rather hard time to connect with it as the narrative structure was really obscure which made for a quite mesmerizing but also rather frustrating viewing. Basically, what did he try to achieve with this tale? Difficult to say… Roger Ebert had an interesting theory that the film was about the severe pains ending in death inflected by Nazism, which is represented by the train, and the moral culpability of Americans and others who turned up too late to save the victims of these trains and the camps where they delivered their doomed human cargo. Personally, I thought that Katharina Hartmann maybe represented Germany, a beautiful attractive woman haunted and wounded by her past who ‘s not able to move forward. Leopold Kessler would then represent the USA, a young cute but rather clueless and naïve young man, who tries to fix things up but has actually no clue about what’s actually going on. Of course, those are just theories and I had seriously no idea what von Trier tried to achieve and, sometimes, you just have the feeling he wants to mess up with the audience, something he always do with all his movies. At least, his movie had a very interesting visual style, mostly in black and white, but sometimes with some colors here and there and he also mixed some different camera shots and techniques, creating a rather impressive visual collage. Unfortunately, even though I admired this feature, I can’t say I was really blown away. It was a little too osbcure for my taste and I really hard a hard time to care for the main character who was basically a spineless clueless wimp. Anyway, to conclude, even though I wasn’t really convinced, it remains an intriguing feature and it is definitely worth a look, especially if you are interested in Lars von Trier’s work.

7/10