Hmm... This will take forever to get to the States, but once it does,
I'd love to respond. It sounds like Von Trier's revisiting the stage
motif he used Dogville. Is it comparable? I thought Dogville was quite
interesting because of its format, much like the Asian ghost story
collection "Kwaidan" and other stage performance films (of course, on
some level they are all stage performance, but you know what I mean).
One of the reasons the cutaway sets were very effective in Dogville is
that the reinforcement of how false the story is ("This never really
happened") makes the bitter pill of his climaxes easier to swallow. By
making everything else fake, the characters are more real, more easily
believed.

Looking forward to this one when it's released here.

--Michelle

--- In filmtalkuk@..., "scottishcatriona" wrote:
> I just saw this in Paris, they seem to get films before the UK.
> It's about the legacy of slavery in the Deep South, USA. Set
> in Alabama in the 1930s, it stars Bryce Dallas Howard (the
> blind girl in M Night Shyamalan's laughable The Village) as the
> daughter of a gangster (Willem Dafoe) who finds herself running
> a cotton plantation and trying to empower the black workers,
> after the owner (Lauren Bacall) dies...