"The morality of the police is no different from that of society."

Original Title: Forbrydelsens Element
Starring: Michael Elphick, Esmond Knight, Me Me Lai, Jerold Wells
Director: Lars von Trier
Screenplay: Lars von Trier and Niels Vørsen
Cinematography: Michael Ellis

Sombre. Enigmatic. Brooding. Opaque. Ambitious. THE ELEMENT OF CRIME, Lars von Trier's first film, inspires adjectives and defies explanation. It is a sophisticated experiment in film noir, at once homage and update and critique. It is the type of work that can only exist late in the life of a genre, when all the patterns are established and known, and so can be unstitched, picked apart, reworked.
It is similar, in many ways, to Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, also written in the mid 80s: both works take the building blocks of the detective story and rearrange them, turning them into the foundation for complex existential and epistemological explorations. We begin with detective Fisher (Michael Elphick), returning to England after years of exile in Cairo. He meets his former boss and mentor, Osborne (Esmond Knight), who has written a book called "The Element of Crime," which outlines an investigative methodology based on identification with the criminal. Fisher is then called to investigate the latest in a series of brutal child murders. Naturally, he applies Osborne's theories to the case.
He learns that the murders may or may not have been committed by a man named Harry Gray, who may or may not be dead, and who may or may not be preparing to kill again, to complete the (hypothetical) pattern he has begun. Fisher retraces Gray's route from one murder scene to the next, trying to intuit the pattern and anticipate the next crime; as he does so, he begins to identify, on some level, with the (hypothetical) murderer. It's complicated.
Superficially, much of what goes on follows the familiar routines of film noir: the detective is a loner with his own peculiar code of honour; he meets an elegant, sexy woman (Me Me Lai) who may be connected to the crime, and has an affair with her; his pursuit of the truth is haunted by a fatalistic sense of irrelevance. But traditional detective stories expand: as the detective meets new suspects, finds new evidence, a larger pattern emerges. The story grows as it goes. Here, the story contracts, shrinks, coils in on itself, becomes impacted and internal: Fisher becomes his own suspect, as he doubts his motivations, his capabilities, and perhaps his sanity.
Or maybe that's not what happens. The film is ambiguous and non-literal to the point of being maddening. It encourages many interpretations, but ratifies none of them. Consider a scene in which we see Osborne on TV, answering questions about his theory-cum-book: "The element of crime," he says, "sets up a series of mental exercises designed to improve our understanding of the behavioural pattern of the criminal." Of course, the title of his book is also the title of the movie, and so as we hear this the meaning is doubled: Osborne is explaining how his book is to be read, and von Trier is explaining how his film is to be understood. Or is he? As we move on, the statement's usefulness diminishes, and soon we disregard it as overly simplistic.
This postmodern play of frames within frames, texts within texts, readings within readings, is typical of the movie as a whole, which contrives to be at once dense with import and thoroughly pointless. You can follow the ideas through, try to unravel the tangled knots of significance, but why bother? Von Trier does not have a story of his own to tell: this a story about other stories. It is art theory disguised as art. There is no sense of engagement, of passion, of urgency: it is otiose and abstracted, and so its relationship to quotidian life is tangential at best. You could easily write a compelling thesis on THE ELEMENT OF CRIME, but only with difficulty could you extract any practical wisdom, any human insight.
This is partly because the story does not take place in anything like the "real" world, but rather in an impressionistic refraction of post-war industrial Europe, a post-holocaust England where the place names are German, a rain-dark realm of derelict edifices and unsmiling citizens. All is sepia-toned, slow-moving, shrouded in murk and shadow, seen from strange angles. Von Trier uses silence and slow motion with subtlety and precision, deepening the vivid sense of the unreal, and he returns again and again to particular images--broken glass, a horse, blue light--so that they take on elusive, oneiric significance.
It is a splendid piece of cinematic showmanship, a tour-de-force of atmosphere, and for ambience alone, the film has few equals--which is not surprising, given that von Trier is one of the finest directors at work today. But THE ELEMENT OF CRIME is all ambience, all potential: it envisions a world in which memorable things might happen, but then they do not. When he found his own stories to tell, in ZENTROPA and BREAKING THE WAVES and THE KINGDOM, von Trier came into his own. In this, his debut, he shows that he knows what to do with a camera, but not what to say with it. In the end, it's hard to say if it's a good film or a bad film. It's complicated.
Review by David Dalgleish (posted on January 18th, 1999)