`Medea' is a stark picture of von Trier's morality

By Wesley Morris, Globe Staff, 9/5/2003

Way back in 1987, the Dane of pain -- or Lars von Trier to you --made "Medea," Euripides' infanticide shocker, for Danish television. Watching it now, after von Trier has reaped international plaudits and caused a lot of trouble with "Breaking the Waves," "The Idiots," and "Dancer in the Dark," you can see on visceral display each theme -- romantic disillusionment and the ensuing martyrdom -- and nearly every visual pose the writer-director would later strike.

Set in mythic Nordic lairs and landscapes (sweaty caves and, even better, lushly ominous meadowlands), the film features a story and visual orchestration that have an undeniable heaven-hell split. If you think you can smell brimstone for the entire 74-minute running time, you aren't overreacting.

Von Trier, who would go on to mock and punish his heroines for their compassion and fervor, seems scarily fond of this Medea (Kirsten Olesen), a sturdy, serious wife and mother. He's smitten with -- rather than in judgment of -- her ghastly, violent resolve.

After years of standing by Jason (a younger, almost handsome Udo Kier), and using her witchcraft to get him through rocky Viking years, Medea is dumped and banished. Jason takes up with the younger, purer Glauce (Ludmilla Glinska), who's basically his boss's daughter. To hurt him, Medea hangs their two small sons from a tree perched hauntingly amid amber waves of grain. Soul-chilling as that moment is, it's not the showstopper you might imagine.

In fact, this interpretation is hotblooded without being truly sensationalistic. Von Trier merely hoped to leave an offering at the altar of his late Danish cinematic forefather, Carl Theodor Dreyer, on whose script this movie is based and about whom von Trier boasted that he was in "telepathic communication" for most of the shoot.

Yet the picture is noticeably free of psychological cause, which is what drives Dreyer's films to religious transcendence. In movies such as "The Passion of Joan of Arc" and "Ordet," Dreyer's allegories of man and his faith and his breathtaking close-ups of undaunted believers break your heart. His troublesome disciple would rather smash it with a sledgehammer.

Still, "Medea" works on von Trier's own imagistic terms. There are shots and sequences in this movie that feel unique: the sands blowing in mists along a dune like fog at a grand Saharan disco, Kier's devastated Jason wandering across those undulating grains, and some delicate, sensual silhouette-making with campfire and a scrim.

More important, you can see in von Trier's later incarnation as a moral taskmaster that it wasn't enough for him to reconstitute Euripides' play and keep remaking "Medea." Von Trier wanted to play Medea himself. He's been performing the role of a bully who keeps slaughtering innocents just to get a reaction ever since.

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Wesley Morris can reached at wmorris@globe.com.