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Product Detail |
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Audio Format: DD 1.0 Mono Video Format: Widescreen 1.85:1 (Anamorphic) Languages: English Subtitles: English, Korean Region Code: ALL Year Made: 1984 Running Time: 104
 A detective plagued by headaches goes to a hypnotist and relives his investigation into a serial killer case in Lars von Trier's first feature, The Element of Crime. Fisher (Michael Elphick), a retired policeman, returns to Europe at the behest of his mentor, Osborne (Esmond Knight of The Red Shoes). Osborne, the author of an influential textbook called The Element of Crime, has given up his investigation into the Lotto Murders, in which a number of lottery ticket salesgirls have been killed and mutilated.
The new chief of police, Kramer (former Benny Hill Show regular Jerold Wells), is a trigger-happy lunatic who objects to Fisher's methodical approach to crime solving. Osborne, meanwhile, seemingly losing his grip on reality, insists that the killer, Harry Grey, died in a car crash. Using Osborne's methods, Fisher tries to delve into the mind of Grey by following the path of a trip the killer took three years earlier, while Osborne was investigating him. Along the way, Fisher hooks up with a prostitute, Kim (Me Me Lai), who also has a link to Grey. As he gets closer to unraveling the mystery, Fisher finds himself taking on more and more aspects of the killer's persona. Von Trier uses a traditional film noir style voice-over, while visually, his film is a monochromatic sepia tone with occasional flashes of fluorescent blue. This film brought von Trier international attention, paving the way for his success with Zentropa and The Kingdom.
Lars von Trier's The Element of Crime is a cerebral, postmodern, well-conceived, and beautifully shot film. But for all of its cleverness and its striking imagery, it's strangely unsatisfying. After making this film, and the equally stylized but more entertaining Zentropa, von Trier eventually moved on to co-found the Dogme movement. After making The Element of Crime, it would be understandable if the filmmaker felt he'd exhausted the possibilities of this kind of cinema. The Element of Crime's vaguely sci-fi premise is reminiscent of other postmodern science fiction/noirs like Alphaville and Blade Runner, and presages the geometrically motivated serial killer and color-coded dystopia in Alex Cox's Death and the Compass. This film's carefully composed images, strange color scheme, and amusingly self-conscious voice-over couldn't be further from Dogme.
While it's fairly fascinating, sporadically funny, and intellectually engaging, it all seems more like an elaborate mind game than a story, and it's completely devoid of emotional weight. Von Trier is comically aware of the film's shaky plotting. The hypnotist (Ahmed El Shenawi) reminds his meandering narrator, Fisher (Michael Elphick), early on in the film, "The story, what is the story?" and he could just as well ask it again at the end. Von Trier mined richer emotional ground in his later films, and while his sincerity will probably always be questioned, few would disagree that his post-Dogme work has more raw emotional power. The Element of Crime is impressive filmmaking, but it's very cold.
Features:
Stig Bjorkman's Critically Acclaimed 52-Minute Documentary Tranceformer: A Portrait Of Lars von Trier (1997), with Optional English Subtitles
Trailer
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