The Five Obstructions is a one-of-a-kind film, but one that might be familiar to anyone that is in a school of some kind for an art-form. You know the kind: you'll have a teacher look at something you did, and say 'it was not done as to how I said it should be', and give a grade accordingly or tell you to do it again. Lars von Trier is running the school of sorts in The Five Obstructions, and his student, aptly enough, is one of the people who made him want to become a director: Jorgen Leth, an experimental/avant-garde director whose film, artistically mesmerizing and pretentious The Perfect Human, is put to a test. Or rather, von Trier tests himself, I suppose, by testing his mentor: remake the film five times, based on 'obstructions' that are set up.
In other words, it's a bit like the Dogme 95 school in action, only not really in that it's not Dogme 95 rules. It's rules that von Trier makes for Leth, a perfectly pleasant and dedicated artist, in order for him to tap deeper into himself, to find something in his art that isn't really there. The rules are outrageous and intriguing: make the film with only 12-frames-per-cut in Cuba and with no set, and make the film again as... a cartoon (both filmmakers hate cartoons, and it also is meant to give Leth a sense of total control... to be sloppy). Lastly, we see von Trier's own obstruction, a film with Leth's name as director and narration reading a letter to 'Silly von Trier', that is not great as a short by itself but does wrap the film around and sum it up very nicely and completely - whose really following the rules, the defender or the attacker?
Who reveals himself more in this sort of "chess-match" that is always jovial and done in the spirit of creating film? No other documentary I can think of shows filmmakers like this in the process of creating. Leth is perfectly willing to go along with von Trier, even as he sees it, if only at first, like a punishment of some sort to do the Cuban film with only 12-frame splices. Von Trier, on the other hand, always is dissatisfied, but it is for him like a therapy session as opposed to just a film challenge. He's testing himself much more, arguably, than he is testing Leth, because he is the one coming up with these rules, that it's about what he sees in the film from Leth, putting cards on the table. After seeing Antichrist, a film that I didn't respond to favorably, I can at least understand the man who made it: Von Trier will provoke himself first, and is intentionally wanting films to be sloppy and crude and even just crap, since that's how he deals with the personality crisis of an artist.
Leth, meanwhile, is sharp and calm and cool, and when given 'Complete Freedom' in an obstruction comes up with a totally free-form version. Is the distance still there that von Trier so desperately wants his mentor to break? It's a fascinating game and search into the artistic soul, but it's also massively entertaining to see these two filmmakers- one who is notorious as a provocateur while the other will be seen by many for the first time in a film, or his film Perfect Human for that matter- dig deeper into the nuts and bolts of process, of what is at stake with where you film, who you film, what means in the technology.
It's also very funny, just seeing von Trier in his quietly menacing way about this artistic fellow Leth (he mentions, like a comic-book villain, that he is an "expert" on Leth and knows him better than he knows himself), and seeing Leth in his own process is fascinating too, how more professional he is but also, like his pupil and challenger, willing to take risks. And the films themselves that are remade, arguably, are better and more wildly imaginative than the original was (my favorites were the Cuban and animated one, though the Bombay film held its own elusive charm).
Not everyone will be thrilled with it- some may begrudge von Trier for putting someone he admires so into such a tight spot that he has to creatively get out of- but those who respond to it should find something that speaks to them. Hell, it may even make filmmakers take on obstructions of their own. Or, at least, people can know what it's like for Lars von Trier to make a film, with only seeing one of them directly. Amazing.
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