Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.
You will now read my words. This review will help you and guide you deeper into the world of the film called Zentropa. Everytime you read a sentence, with every word and every phrase, you will enter a still deeper layer, open, relaxed, and receptive. I shall now count from one to ten. On the count of ten, you will be immersed in this film. I say, “One.” And as you focus your attention entirely on my words, you will slowly begin to relax. Two. Your hands and your fingers are getting warmer and heavier . . .
Zentropa is a hypnotically inventive film featuring astonishing visuals. It was the product of Lars Von Trier, a talented Danish director. It was released in Europe as Europa, which created immediate confusion with another film called Europa Europa, also released in 1991. I can just imagine the conversations that might have ensued at the ticket counters of European cineplexes: “I’d like two Europas, please.” “Is that two tickets for one Europa or one ticket for two Europas, Sir?” Hence the name change for the English subtitled release.
Von Trier is known for his technical mastery but is frequently disparaged for lack of strong narratives. Audiences watching a Von Trier film are typically left to their own devices in figuring out what exactly is happening. That is somewhat the case for The Element of Crime (1984) and the The Kingdom (1994), and it is also the case with Zentropa. Had Von Trier combined the visual strengths of Zentropa with a Hitchcockian-quality narrative, he might very well have produced the best German language film ever. The lack of clarity of the storyline in Zentropa may actually be intentional, which is not, however, to say that it succeeds.
The Story: The story is framed throughout by the hypnotic voice of Max von Sydow (who many readers will remember from such Scandinavian jewels as The Seventh Seal (1957) and Pelle The Conqueror (1987), as well as that masterpiece of horror, The Exorcist (1973). The opening paragraph of this review is, in fact, a slight rewording of the opening narration of Zentropa. Clearly we are to understand that the events of the film are taking place in the world of the subconscious imagination, as a dream or trance. This fits the circumstances perfectly, since we are about to be transported to the Europe of 1945, immediately following the collapse of Germany, to a country in a post-bellum stupor.
By the element of hypnosis, the viewer becomes bespectacled Leopold (Leo) Kessler (Jean-Marc Barr), an idealistic pacifist, born in America to German-born parents. Having refused combat duty, he is determined to make amends by going to Germany in 1945 during the post-War occupation to help with the reconstruction of his parents’ homeland. Leo’s father has instructed him to seek out his uncle, Max Kessler (Ernst-Hugo Jaregard), in Frankfort to help find him a job. His uncle is nonplussed and is rather standoffish and officious. He says coldly to Leo, “I’m your uncle, you may embrace me.” Max, who is both obsessively bureaucratic and alcoholic, works for Zentropa railway, where he is a conductor on a Pullman sleeping car. He has arranged a job for Leo as a trainee. Leo is soon mastering such lofty arts as shoe-polishing and making beds.
On this rather Kafkaesque sleeping car, Leo meets a coolly appealing young heiress, Katharina Hartmann (Barbara Sukowa), the daughter of Max Hartmann (Jorgen Reenbert), the owner and director of Zentropa. The trains of this company had been involved in transporting Jews to the concentration camps but are now back to running a routine transportation schedule. Katharina takes a shine to Leo and invites him for dinner at her home, where he meets her brother, Lawrence Hartmann (Udo Kier), an American intelligence officer, Colonel Harris (Eddie Constantine), and a priest, Pater (Erik Mork). Leo is chided for his pacifism and not having taken sides in the great war, but is otherwise well received.
Bit by bit, the naïve and noncommittal Leo gets increasingly caught up in the web of political intrigue that is post-war Germany. He becomes a pawn of both the American occupiers and the German terrorists, called the “Werewolves.” A romance begins to emerge between Leo and Katharina, who was once a Werewolf herself and may or may not still be one.
Themes: The theme or themes relate to various aspects of the utter disorientation that existed in post-war Germany. Here was a country that prided itself on order and efficiency having to deal instead with chaos. The train, where much of the action takes place, can be seen as a decrepit German state hurtling headlong through a shadowy wasteland into an unknown future. The various characters thoroughly epitomize alienation and paranoia. Sense and nonsense commingle everywhere. We see, for example, persistence of the trivialities of bureaucratic regulations despite the total social upheaval.
One element contributing to disorientation is German shame. The film states, at one point, that 80% of the survivors in the vicinity of Frankfort were either Nazi sympathizers or collaborators, yet the job of the American intelligence units is to ascertain which of those in positions of authority worked with the Nazis and to remove them from those positions if they did. Nearly all of the Germans have dark wartime secrets, since survival in Nazi Germany was not possible without compromising one’s moral integrity.
Nazism had been decapitated, as this story unfolds, but the body was still twitching to some extent. The German resistance was quite active and threatening to both the occupiers and those prepared to collaborate with the Americans in the rebuilding effort and the “new world order.” Much like the current situation in Iraq.
America and Americans are not portrayed as faultless in this film. The charges range from simple insensitivity to the suffering and shame of the German people to the more weighty accusations of American culpability and exploitation. The film claims that many of the German companies producing war materials were owned by Americans or financed by American capital. The American Colonel, at one point, pointedly expresses disinterest in Germans killing Germans and there is the further suggestion that America got there too late to save most of the Jews. In another scene, American engineers are at work destroying cranes in the harbor that will ensure that the German chemical companies remain out-of-business, while also stealing the formulas for the various German chemical weapons. We also observe the occupiers picking and choosing hypocritically which Nazi-collaborations to overlook because the collaborator is considered essential to the occupation effort.
Production Values: Lars von Trier exhibits virtuoso mastery over a wide array of visual techniques, including double-exposures and the integration of black-and-white, color, and even mixed color/black-and-white images. He creates an illusory world using the entire assortment of optical effects. In one scene, two trains are traveling on parallel tracks. Leo is on one and Katharina on the other. They reach across the intervening space to touch fingers. Then the trains diverge slowly and pull them ever increasingly apart. At the beginning of the film, while Max von Sydow intones like a hypnotist, we watch train tracks speeding toward us with mesmerizing surrealism as though we were pinned to the front of the train. In the background in many scenes, we see a bleak, film noir-like, devastated, industrial wasteland. Von Trier has created a complex visual universe that is utterly dazzling. We feel like we are in some kind of trance or dream. We feel the disorientation that the people felt in this time and place. As an illumination of the situation in post-war Germany, Zentropa is extraordinarily evocative.
On the other hand, the narrative of this film never really comes together. There is no real character development (unless one wants to consider post-war Germany itself a character in this story) and, as a result, no person with whom we empathize very much. One can argue, I suppose, that the framing of the film makes it clear that it is presenting itself as a stylish dream or hypnotic trance, in which case the vague and meandering feel of the story can be viewed as mimicking the style of the subconscious mind. The problem, though, is that the storyline also has the feel of a mystery and viewers are trained to approach a mystery as something to figure out. We are drawn into looking for meaning, but end up with neither tension, meaning, nor resolution.
Jean-Marc Barr is very convincing as the pacifist who is unable to choose sides or even commit himself to a set of beliefs. He also appeared in Hope and Glory (1987) as Corporal Bruce Carrey. Barbara Sukowa is sexy as Katharina and was also the female lead in both Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) and Marianne and Juliane (1981). The performances in this film were consistently good.
Bottom-Line:Zentropa was awarded both the Prix du Technique (Technical Prize) and the Jury Price (Director’s Award) at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, but not the Palme d’Or, causing the egotistical Von Trier to give the jury the finger and stalk off. This is a very good film, but one of those instances where I am left feeling that it could have been a great film had the deficiencies in the script been overcome. The visual technique of this film compares favorably with any film I have ever watched. This film is rated R for sexuality and language. It is in German and English with English subtitles during the German language portions. The running time is 112 minutes. I strongly recommend this film regardless of the weaknesses in the narrative because of its visual splendor and its indelible portrait of the disorientation that inevitably accompanies defeat in war.
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You might want to check out these other excellent films from Germany:
Lars von Trier's bizarre yarn concerns Leopold Kessler Jean-Marc Barr a German American who becomes involved in a surreal nightmare in postwar Germany...More at Family Video
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