Lars von Trier, Denmark, 1998

The Idiots provides more evidence that Dogma 95 could as easily have been called Disability 101, so frequently are its practitioners drawn to subjects of derangement, deprivation, and dysfunction. Psychological disability has a special hold on the Dogma imagination; even if you count the family lunacy of The Celebration as sociological symbol rather than psychiatric symptom, mental incapacity seizes a striking amount of screen time in other films hearing the movement's imprimatur, from Mifune with its retarded-brother character to julien donkey-boy with its schizophrenic protagonist. All of which reflects the recurring influence of Dogma godfather Lars, von Trier, whose Breaking the Waves (sexual obsession plus physical paralysis) and The Kingdom (a veritable catalogue of afflictions) inspired the, movement, even though they don't display its seal in the opening credits.

Von Trier's official entry in the series, Dogma 2: "The Idiots" (aka Idioterne), stands as the ne plus ultra of Dogma films to date, since most of its characters spend large parts of the movie acting like. well, idiots. in the clinical sense of the term. They're members of a Copenhagen commune who rebel against middle-class society by what they call "spazzing" - that is, "getting in touch with your inner idiot" through playful rebellion against commonplace notions of decency and decorum. This usually takes the form of visiting public places - restaurants, suburban streets, the local swimming pool - and unleashing a variety of "retard" behaviors that startle and discombobulate the middle-class householders they encounter there. Structuring its plot with the timetested "apprenticeship" format, the movie views these antics through the eyes of a young woman named Karen, who meets the spazzers by chance, progresses from bemused spectator to fitful participant, and eventually revisits her own conventional family, which turns out to have exactly the sorts of emotional deficiencies - encapsulated by its failure to nurture Karen through a recent tragedy she's, suffered - that her new friends ridicule via their aggressively unsocialized gestures.

Von Trier has said the idea for The Idiots started to emerge as the Dogma credo itself was crystallizing in the mid-Nineties, and sure enough, the picture is a near-perfect embodiment of Dogma doctrines. Both are generally motivated by the notion of "losing control." a habitual von Trier theme, and both are specifically rooted in improvisatory acting, which Dogma directors encourage and which is what the spazzing routine boils down to. Although such terminology wouldn't occur to them, the spazzers are a de facto ensemble of performance artists who base their allegedly subversive activities on a radical rejection of boundaries between spectators, performers, and performance space. This erasure of borders reaches one climax (so to speak) when the gang has a group-sex orgy, filmed in hard-core splendor and probably the main reason why The Idiots has been languishing on the USA Films shelf instead of gracing American theaters since its premiere at Cannes in spring 1998. It reaches another kind of culmination when a commune member points out the hollowness of aiming provocations at strangers, daring his fellow spazzers to start inflicting their "retard" impersonations on people who really matter in their lives. Karen does just this when she visits her family in the movie's last scene, and her relatives' inability to take her infantile behavior in stride is presumably meant to illustrate the terminal uncharmingness of the bourgeoisie and the rightness of her return to spazzland. This plot maneuver sums up the movies strongest and weakest aspects. On a thematic level, the groups reluctant recognition of its own lessthan-total commitment makes an implicit comment on the need for all agitational art (filmmaking included) to pursue its convictions to their logical conclusions. On a narrative level, though, Karen's passive-aggressive assault on an unsuspecting family hardly makes for persuasive moral or dramatic closure.

Some features of the Dogma approach - natural lighting, on-location shooting, no added music or superfluous props - indicate the movement's desire to create a sort of neo-neorealism by stressing cinema's human ingredients over the visual and technological trickery that von Trier and likeminded directors (Thomas Vinterberg. Soren Kragh-Jacobsen) feel have accumulated too much power in modern film. While the best moments of The Celebration and Mifune demonstrate the appeal of this resurgent humanism, The Idiots misses the point of the manifesto von Trier helped create, using self-congratulatory sensationalism as an inadequate substitute for the psychological depth and sociological insight that must characterize realism under any label if it's to be meaningfully expressive. In some of his previous work, von Trier shows a sophisticated awareness of the uncanny wisdom to be gleaned from the minds and hearts of people (most notably the Kingdom basement-dwellers with Down's syndrome) who have been forced to society's margins. In a move as puerile as it is unexpected, The Idiots replaces openness and understanding with mimicry and mockery, replicating the childishness of its characters by implicitly daring its own audience to move beyond "political correctness" and get a vicarious charge from watching self-proclaimed rebels drool, slobber, and cavort the way real "retards" do.

Of course the canons of kneejerk liberalism can use a good shaking up from time to time, and of course von Trier is an excellent candidate for the job, given his longtime skepticism toward traditional definitions of "good taste" and "common sense," not to mention the censorship standards that the flamboyant genitalia of The Idiots blast right off the screen. But an artist of von Trier's stature can surely think of better ways to disrupt the cinematic status quo than by making the Dogma 95 equivalent of a teenage gross-out flick.