The Element of CrimeThink back to a dream you had, to the images and the sounds you imagined; imagined, because they were not actually there, but somewhere inside, you believed they were. You were not conscious, you were not really where--or even when--you saw what you saw, but you remember. Dreams do not play by the rules we follow--they are alien, but also familiar. They are possessed with a foreign familiarity, a knowing abstraction. Lars von Trier's The Element of Crime leads us through those dank passages, guided by a leash of somnambulism, where our experiences are the conjured recipe of hypnosis and virtual narcolepsy.
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The Element of Crime is a psychological thriller, but with an emphasis on metaphoric imagery to establish the tone and deprive us of those pat and patterned expectations which can plague run-of-the-mill thrillers. The film gets its title from the name of a book one of the characters in the story has written--Osborne (Esmond Knight)--which his disciple, Fisher (Michael Elphick), has take to utilize as his bible for his own detective work. Fisher has returned from Cairo after a thirteen-year exile at the behest of Osborne, though for reasons which only become clear as the story progresses...and not even that clear by design. "The Element of Crime"--the book--dictates a profiling method for understanding crime--and criminals--by putting the detective in the psychological role of the criminal, revisiting past events in the criminal's history, trying to get in their head. Compare this risky method with the dodgy kind of therapy Fisher is seeking at the onset of the film, his hypnosis at the hands of an indifferent hypnotist, as Fisher attempts to rid the headaches tied to his past in Europe. How then is the method presented in "The Element of Crime" really any different than a kind of hypnosis? Fisher's drudging through the trenches of his mind via his oneiric odyssey is aptly dreamlike, where the rules of logic do not apply. No, there are no supernatural moments, but the characters, dialogue, scenery...everything seems as though it belongs to no real world we would know, even if it might be vaguely familiar. Everything in The Element of Crime is tinged through a filter...a filter of illusion, of night, of the dreamscape, where the color deprives us of the benefit of seeing the complexity of the tale, our higher brain functions temporarily disabled in the interest of experiencing the plot on an instinctual level. To say that The Element of Crime is film noir would not be entirely accurate, if only on the literal level, since the most consistent monochromatic hues are of a nauseous yellow tinge, and a "red-light district" rouge.
Attempting to draw logic from the film's plot is akin to drawing water from a stone, but the more entertaining pursuits of psychoanalysis have often times made that very same effort, seeking the scattered pieces in the soupy discharge of the psyche, the backwash of our subconscious which is what our dreams are made of...hardly romantic, I confess. Consider the name of our protagonist: Fisher; a "fisher" is one who pulls something from the water, which Fisher does literally on occasion in his pursuit of the elusive killer of lotto girls, Harry Gray. And in The Element of Crime, water is ubiquitous, everywhere, a contrast to the arid backdrop of Cairo--from the rain to the lakes to the ministrations delivered unto the unconscious to rouse them from their fainting. There is a ritual among the people of the region Fisher is working in, where townspeople will leap from a tower toward the lake with a rope tied to their ankle, a kind of painful salute to the water--but is it meant to glorify the water or condemn it? Who can say? Is Fisher an agent for anything more than just aping the theory of his former mentor? Fisher's path crosses with a prostitute named Kim (Meme Lai), and the two carry on an affair, replete with absurd lines of lusty seduction. As Fisher recruits Kim to adopt characteristics of Harry's wife--detailed in the elusive tailing report--it becomes apparent that both Fisher and Kim are merely acting out roles which have been preset by Mr. Gray. In a way, this is a metaphor for film, with Harry being the invisible director influencing the others to act how he wants them to with his ephemeral authority. Similarly, with the hypnotist's occasional interjection and commentary, he represents a kind of "critic"--critical of Fisher's own hypnotic testimony, and even the plot. Then that would leave Fisher as us, the audience, following along in the shoes of a killer, as we follow along with him, guided by the string of the mystery.
Recommended for: Fans of a surreal and unusual procedural thriller, where the procedure is a parallel for the hypnotic film and the process in the film. Like a half-recollected dream, the film is more satisfying when not attempting to dissect the plot, but rewards attentive viewers with subconscious visual cues.
Attempting to draw logic from the film's plot is akin to drawing water from a stone, but the more entertaining pursuits of psychoanalysis have often times made that very same effort, seeking the scattered pieces in the soupy discharge of the psyche, the backwash of our subconscious which is what our dreams are made of...hardly romantic, I confess. Consider the name of our protagonist: Fisher; a "fisher" is one who pulls something from the water, which Fisher does literally on occasion in his pursuit of the elusive killer of lotto girls, Harry Gray. And in The Element of Crime, water is ubiquitous, everywhere, a contrast to the arid backdrop of Cairo--from the rain to the lakes to the ministrations delivered unto the unconscious to rouse them from their fainting. There is a ritual among the people of the region Fisher is working in, where townspeople will leap from a tower toward the lake with a rope tied to their ankle, a kind of painful salute to the water--but is it meant to glorify the water or condemn it? Who can say? Is Fisher an agent for anything more than just aping the theory of his former mentor? Fisher's path crosses with a prostitute named Kim (Meme Lai), and the two carry on an affair, replete with absurd lines of lusty seduction. As Fisher recruits Kim to adopt characteristics of Harry's wife--detailed in the elusive tailing report--it becomes apparent that both Fisher and Kim are merely acting out roles which have been preset by Mr. Gray. In a way, this is a metaphor for film, with Harry being the invisible director influencing the others to act how he wants them to with his ephemeral authority. Similarly, with the hypnotist's occasional interjection and commentary, he represents a kind of "critic"--critical of Fisher's own hypnotic testimony, and even the plot. Then that would leave Fisher as us, the audience, following along in the shoes of a killer, as we follow along with him, guided by the string of the mystery.
Recommended for: Fans of a surreal and unusual procedural thriller, where the procedure is a parallel for the hypnotic film and the process in the film. Like a half-recollected dream, the film is more satisfying when not attempting to dissect the plot, but rewards attentive viewers with subconscious visual cues.