At times viewing a film can become a two-pronged exercise; you are irresistibly lured into its world even as a part of you stands outside of the overpowering spell to question the filmmaker’s seduction game with his audience. Lars Von Trier’s The House That Jack Built on the serial killer Jack The Ripper is one such crazy beast of a film. The packed press show on Tuesday morning came with its own frisson, apprehensions more than expectations what with the mass walkouts at its red carpet screening the previous evening at Grand Theatre Lumiere. Artistic director Thierry Fremaux had earlier spoken about the film’s controversial subject being the reason for it being featured in the out of competition category; the rare “explicit violence” warning on the tickets was enough to expect scenes of gore and brutality. But no one, perhaps, was prepared for a film as vile.
A tale of five murders in 12 years is told from Jack The Ripper’s perspective. As the murders pile on they also keep getting more and more gruesome — a duckling’s legs snapped off with pliers, children and women mutilated in ways beyond imagination and certainly not suitable for description here. And, if that was not enough, women are also referred to and portrayed as stupid, “dumb as doorknob” victims.
Mind of a murderer
The journey into the deranged, OCD-ridden, but brilliant mind of the murderer is as much about the killings as the interspersed intellectual debates and musings about art and culture — Glen Gould’s piano, gothic churches, lamps and shadows, Blake’s poem of the tiger and the lamb, about the co-existence of the innocent and the cruel in the world, about hell and heaven being the same. “The old cathedrals have sublime art hidden away in the dark corners that only God can see,” says Jack. There are Biblical allusions aplenty even as Mr. Von Trier speaks on behalf of the Devil through the voice of Jack for whom murder is a “liberation”. Things are then also tied up with Hitler and the Buchenwald concentration camp and several other instances of violence down the ages. And you are left bewildered about what Mr. Von Trier is trying to say. Is he saying that God is dead? Is he scoffing at the larger moral vacuity — the inability to differentiate between good and bad? Is he pointing a finger at how immured and immune we have become to violence? Does he intentionally want to test us for the amount of brutality we can take? Are acts of violence also works of art? Or is Mr. Von Trier just being manipulative with his audience and indulgent with his craft?
The House That Jack Built is a superbly realised film with an incredible epilogue that had me as riveted as repulsed, as enticed as angered. This is what makes it so insidious with its sadism. Did Mr. Von Trier just make me sell my soul to the Devil?
