Lars von Trier’s film from 1998 is re-released as part of the ongoing retrospective dedicated to this director, a film pioneeringly shot on digital video according to the minimalist guidelines of the Dogme 95 collective, which undoubtedly helped create an affordability-revolution in indie film-making. After a quarter of a century, The Idiots looks as cheerfully shallow, smug and manipulative as anything he has ever done, yet revisiting this needlingly insistent and epically tiresome film does bring into focus the way in which the debate around disability representation has changed, and also the subversive prank aesthetic that has to some degree governed the entire career of this unique film-maker.
The Idiots is about people playing tricks, gigglingly pretending to have cerebral palsy or some form of learning disability in order to freak out the uptight bourgeois in their restaurants and workplaces – and, of course, the cinema auditorium. They callously call it “spassing”, or use the English phrase “mentally retarded”. Karen (Bodil Jørgensen) is a deeply unhappy woman, in shock after a tragedy in her life which is explained only at the very end. Dining alone in a restaurant one day, she is intrigued at what appears to be a group of disabled adults there, minimally controlled by their carer and embarrassing the other diners, whose fastidious politeness prevents them from expressing their obvious disapproval and disgust. Karen goes back with these people to their house, where she finds they are simply pretending: a commune-cult led by the charismatic Stoffer (Jens Albinus) whose wealthy uncle owns their HQ and believes his nephew to be house-sitting the property prior to it being sold off.
Stoffer believes in radical “idiocy” in public (perhaps like Ken Kesey and his 60s Merry Pranksters), challenging attitudes for the sheer anarchic hell of it, but also ascending into a blissful state of freedom from behavioural norms. But when a commune member brings people with actual Down’s syndrome to tea in their house one afternoon – a perfectly happy and cordial event – Stoffer storms off angrily, every bit as disgusted and resentful as the hated bourgeois. So is this the satirical twist in von Trier’s tale? Not quite. It could be that Stoffer is contemptuous of his comrades’ muddle-headed soft-heartedness, losing their nerve and flinching from the radical nihilism he’s been preaching.
Yet there is, as with much of von Trier’s work, a kind of general, over-arching superstructure of satire. Pretending to have a mental disability is in outrageously bad taste … yes … but all of us who swooned over the excruciating good taste of, say, Daniel Day-Lewis’s Oscar-winning impression of Christy Brown in My Left Foot, are we not part of the absurdity that Stoffer is railing against? Stoffer will finally condemn one of his fellow idiots for only going part of the way in their imposture, sneering: “Go a little bit mad but not too much.”
That is actually very similar to the maxim of Robert Downey Jr’s notorious method actor Kirk Lazarus in the Hollywood satire Tropic Thunder, about the importance of restraint in impersonating disabled people in a famous scene which incidentally goes much further in just two minutes than The Idiots manages in two hours. The Idiots works as a situationist provocation about a situationist provocation, though claiming the sentimental high ground at the end. As ever, von Trier gets points for his sheer chutzpah.
• The Idiots is released on 18 August in UK cinemas.
