European Films

Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier has an obsession with the country he feels he knows so well despite never having been there: the United States. His last two films, Dogville and Manderlay were set in the US, and the new film from fellow Dane Thomas Vinterberg for which von Trier wrote the screenplay is again an American affair. The involvement of Vinterberg, however, gives the work a more mainstream feeling and a sensuality that Von Trier’s work often lacks. Dear Wendy, as their collaboration is called, could very well be the best work of both filmmakers.

 

Dear Wendy is set in the fictive American mining town Estherslope and focuses on the hot topics of weapon ownership and violence. A mind-blowing Jamie Bell, who forever erases Billy Elliot out of our collective minds, plays Dick, is a born pacifist who hates the idea of working in the mines and rebels by working in the supermarket instead. When he buys what he thinks is a toy gun for a friend’s birthday, he soon becomes obsessed with it. His co-worker Stevie (Mark Webber) shares his pacifist interest in guns and together they start carrying their weapon secretly to boost their self-confidence. Their standing in the little community soon increases and the two boys decide to help the other losers of Estherslope by setting up a secret armed pacifists club in an abandoned part of the mines. They call themselves Dandies and set up some rules, which include a prohibition on showing their weapon to anyone but their fellow Dandies and never using it outside of the mines, where they practice shooting.

 

Every single one of them slowly becomes less afraid of the world and more content with themselves; all of them also become excellent sharp shooters. They  start to dress differently, supposedly like real dandies but in practice they look more like kids who robbed the wardrobe of the now-defunct Swedish band Army of Lovers. That name would suit them well, though, because another one of their rules is to never use the word "shooting", but instead always use the word "loving"; they might in fact become an Army of Lovers much quicker than any of them would have imagined.  

 

Things start to change when Dick is asked by the local sheriff (Bill Pullman) to be a sort of parole officer for Sebastian (Danso Gordon), a youth who used a gun to defend himself (or so Sebastian explains the situation) and thus killed a man. Dick, who feels he can rule the world because of the gun he is secretly carrying, decides to introduce Sebastian to his own gun and to the Dandies. Much to his surprise, Dick discovers that guns can be just as capricious as men, or are the owners seeing too much into their guns' behaviour?

 

Unlike von Trier’s previous films, which many have labelled as unilateral rants against the United States, Dear Wendy offers us a more balanced investigation of its topic, at least for the film's first hour. What makes a gun attractive, how can a proclaimed pacifist succumb to the mental power a gun can give its owner and why do gun crazy people personify their guns to such an unhealthy extent? Let there be no doubt about the film’s ending or the script’s intentions; this film is very much anti-gun and -violence. With Vinterberg being used as a filter for von Trier’s ideas however, the story’s intellectual undercurrents are much more calibrated and clearer even though the film’s formal aspects are much more conventional.

 

Much like his previous film It’s All About Love, Vinterberg opts for a deliciously sensuous way of filmmaking, which is greatly supported by the alternatively sun-drenched and candle-lit work of cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (he also worked on the austere Dogville for von Trier), the dandies' excessive wardrobes and the frequent use of inserts. Despite the relatively few and simple sets, which no doubt have been designed by von Trier in the same way he designed the chalk lines on the floor in Dogville, Vinterberg keeps aiming for a feeling of heightened filmic reality even as the story progresses more and more into allegory and eventually satire.

 

The wedding of these two filmmakers' different styles and interests make Dear Wendy stronger rather than weaker; add to that an all-round excellent cast and a soundtrack by The Zombies that has been niftily interwoven with the narrative, and you have one of the most intelligent, beautiful and thought-provoking films of the year.

 

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