Europa

AFTER WORLD WAR II LEO Kessler ends up in Germany and gets work as a train-conductor. He meets Katharina, the daughter of the rail-road company's president. Nazi partisans has captured her and are trying to force Leo to blow up the train when it passes a bridge in exchange for Katharina's freedom. A nightmarish and extravagant thriller.
Comment:
EUROPA IS A FILM, NEARING A HYPNOTIC experience. It's a veritable machinery of suggestion.
Lars von Trier's film was awarded with a jury prize and the ''Prix Superieure Technique'' at the Cannes-festival this Spring and it's difficult to imagine a film more worthy of it. Europa is a film that constantly surprises and dazzles, it's an image-maniac's superior demonstrations in the possibilities of the film medium. The powerful Panvisionscreen reminds you of an experimental arena, a giant panel bulging from the filmmaker's inventive action-painting.
But the film is not only a technical tour-de-force (with daring camera shots, back-projection and visuals, illusionistic sequence transmissions). The aesthetic is also a reflection of the theme.
Europa moves between illusion and betrayal. We're in Germany, year 1, right after World War II. A young American of German decent, harbouring vague dreams of reunion, gets a job as train conductor at the rail-road company Zentropa. The quiet American meets the daughter of the rail-road company owner, and is pulled into a game of intrigues not only regarding family matters but questions of guilt and mercy, penance and restitution. The protagonist becomes a pawn in a political game, where the new allied power and the surviving nazi sympathizers' terror organization the Werewolves are the antagonists.
The rail-road company is the perfect symbol for postwar Germany with its struggle for order in a boundless chaos. And the train with its passengers and unavoidable hierarchy, from the select few in First Class to the ''secret'' freight wagons, similar to moving Concentration Camps, become a micro cosmos, threatened by the passengers' self-destructiveness and disruption and the violence which ruins every effort towards a new co-existence and unity.
Outside the train eternal and impenetrable night appears to reign. Each time the young idealist tries to explore the deserted landscape outside the compartment window his diligent boss and uncle pulls the curtain: ''There is nothing to see!'' With fervent empathy and mischievous irony the actor Ernst-Hugo Järegård portrays a thoroughbred bureaucrat, serving the authorities.
As political allegory Europa will most likely start controversies and it might get criticized for lack of clarity and analysis. But this nightmarish vision between the campy and the complicated, with traits from Kafka and Fritz Lang, Wagner and Courts-Mahler, is impressive in its consistency and energy. Max von Sydow's chanting voice narrates during the final seconds: ''You wish you could free yourself of the images of Europa. But it isn't possible.'' _
STIG BJÖRKMAN