The Glory of The Kingdom
Scene for scene, Lars von Trier’s 1994 TV series The Kingdom remains the Danish filmmaker’s most accessible, crowd-pleasing work. It was produced as a four-episode Danish TV miniseries and was released internationally a year later as a four-and-a-half-hour feature. The series ended with the story hanging; a second series, produced in 1997 and also released here as a feature, picked up where that one left off. Von Trier talked about a planned third series, which would have brought the plot to some sort of conclusion, but other projects kept getting in the way. Now it’s unlikely ever to be made: The two most important actors, Ernst-Hugo Järegård and Kirsten Rolffes, have both died, and nobody would be crazy enough to try to fill their shoes.
Both runs of the series have long been available only on VHS in the U.S. and on dubious DVDs from abroad. Koch Lorber has finally released the first of them on a two-disc set.
For those who missed it in theaters, the standard descriptive log line for the show is “a cross between ER and Twin Peaks.” ER didn’t yet exist when von Trier’s show first aired, but the conscious influence of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks is undeniable. When I interviewed von Trier in 1992 upon the release of Zentropa, he expressed indifference to, or even dislike of, Lynch’s features, but overwhelming admiration for the pilot episode of Twin Peaks. “I actually cried when I saw it alone,” he said. “It was for the third time.”
To summarize the plot – even to give merely a sense of the many subplots that intertwine throughout – would take forever and would be a disservice to the material. The basic contrivances, like those in Twin Peaks, are satiric warpings of standard soap-opera complications.
Still, if the set-up and general aesthetic of The Kingdom evoke Lynch, the net effect is quite different – specifically in its balance of humor and weirdness. For all the wit and eccentricity in Twin Peaks, the humor always took an eventual back seat to the spooky, surreal stuff. On the other hand, The Kingdom, despite some genuinely scary moments, is first and foremost funny … funnier by far than its American forerunner.
The new DVD has a much better transfer than the Taiwanese import that cost me twice as much a few years back. The source material was always intentionally grainy, but it looks good here, despite the occasional presence of such flaws as a thread in the lower left of the first conference-room scene on the second disc.
The extras are minor but enjoyable. The best is One Man and His TV Series, a 24-minute documentary made at the time of the show, featuring von Trier, cowriter Niels Vørsel, most of the major players (with the exception of Järegård), and the consulting spiritualist for the ghost scenes. A few of the actors are less than complimentary about the notoriously difficult director.
The second disc includes a trailer for the series and eight commercials (totaling about four and a half minutes) that von Trier shot for the newspaper Ekstra Bladet; seven of them star Järegård, including one in which he’s in drag.
Each disc has what the packaging refers to as “selected commentaries.” These accompany relatively brief chunks of the series and don’t run as part of the feature, but rather as individual items in the extras menu. The commenters are von Trier, Vørsel, and editor Molly Stensgard, only one or two of whom are on any given track. The first disc has three, each about six minutes; the three on the second disc run a bit shorter. On one, von Trier describes one scene as having “perhaps a bit too much Stephen King about it” – which is amusing, given that King remade the show last year as Kingdom Hospital.
The Kingdom, Series One. Directed by Lars von Trier. Written by Lars von Trier & Niels Vørsel; screenplay by Lars von Trier & Tomas Gislason. With Ernst-Hugo Järegård, Kirsten Rolffes, Søren Pilmark, Ghita Nørby, Peter Mygind, Jens Okking, Holger Juul Hansen, Baard Owe, and Udo Kier. Koch Lorber, two discs; $34.98.
~ By ANDY KLEIN ~ 12-1-05
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