Everything I know about ______ I learned from ________.

Everything I know about __being a total pain in the ass__ I learned from __The Five Obstructions__ . As a filmmaker Lars Von Trier tends to inspire either love or hate, but there has always been a third option: finding the man himself seriously hilarious. There's no doubt that his cheerfully bizarre homilies at the end of each episode were one of the the best things about his 1994 E.R.-meets-Twin Peaks tv series, The Kingdom. But in The Five Obstructions (2003) Von Trier's amazing facility for being intriguing and annoying at the same time is given full rein. The premise of the film--Von Trier challenges Jorgen Leth to remake his 1967 experimental classic The Perfect Human five times, with a different set of "obstructions" imposed each time--sets the scene for Von Trier to fully exercise his talent for being a complete prick.

The films Leth actually makes feel somewhat inconsequential by comparison to the meetings between him and Von Trier. I do not especially love Leth's original film--it feels just a little too formalist and dated now--and the remakes are not particularly remarkable. Everyone tends to have a favourite and for me the second one, set in a Bombay slum, is the one I find most effective, mostly for the presence of the girl behind Leth's left shoulder who looks as if she is about to jump through the plastic screen at any moment in order to get to the food. However the exchanges between Leth and Von Trier as the latter sets the obstructions and evaluates each remake are absolutely priceless. At first the directives Von Trier imposes seem carefully considered--no edit longer than 12 frames, no set--but they soon devolve into spontaneously inspired, even capricious choices: when Leth remarks that he has never been to Cuba, Von Trier instantly seizes upon this random fact to impose a further condition: shoot it in Cuba. Leth however returns in triumph: after spending a sleepless night agonizing over the 12-frame edits, he discovers it was in fact "a gift," setting the tone for all further conferences. Each time they meet the preternaturally calm presence of Leth seems to provoke Von Trier into a greater frenzy of malicious rule-making, as he attempts to provoke the unflappable Leth by posing increasingly crippling challenges. But by the time he arrives at the third obstruction, he is already bringing out the big guns: when he decides to punish Leth for finessing his way around the second set of obstructions, he orders that the next remake be made under the condition "no restrictions," an imperative so cruel and unusual Leth audibly groans. When Leth returns triumphantly--having ingeniously intepreted this obstruction as a directive to "remake the film as if you were Eric Rohmer"--Von Trier is forced to resort to the nuclear option. He insists that Leth's next remake be a cartoon, a blow so far below the belt it inspires Leth to grimly remark, I hate cartoons. To which Von Trier replies, So do I.