Tongue-Tied Hurt

It's doubtful that you'll see another film like Dogville anytime soon. The latest effort from Danish director Lars Von Trier is certainly a challenge to summarise. Nicole Kidman stars as a woman on the run from the Mob who hides out in the mythological, depression era town of Dogville only to find herself used and abused by the town's inhabitants. But that's just the surface story. It's also a three-hour allegorical tale about American culture shot entirely on a soundstage with minimal props and chalk-outlines for sets. And if that's not enough, it continues to spark controversy thanks to Von Trier's decision to make a film critiquing America's value systems without ever having set foot in the United States. No wonder the film's narrator, the ever-excellent John Hurt, was having a hard time explaining his feelings about the film at its LFF premiere on Sunday night. "It's like everything that Lars does, it's highly experimental," Hurt told Empire Online. "It is to all intents and purposes satirical but it twists and turns and goes through various other incarnations and finishes up like Greek Tragedy. I kind of dread it when people ask what I thought of it because it's very difficult to say. It's definitely cinematic and yet it uses an enormous amount of voice over. It's a marriage between two languages in a sense - literature and cinema." And just what was the man who created all this like? "It was an eye opener because I had no idea he was such an amusing man," enthused Hurt. "We had a hell of a laugh doing it. We worked very hard, because at that time I was doing a play in the West End, but he was an amazing guy altogether. I'd love to work with him again" Given that Dogville is the first in a proposed trilogy of American-set films, maybe he'll get the chance. "I don't know," said Hurt, "I hope so."