The Five Obstructions

No matter how haughty your cinematic tastes may be, this 90-minute effort from director Lars von Trier will not fail to infuriate.

In 1967, Danish documentary film-maker Jorgen Leth made The Perfect Human, a 12-minute short detailing the daily activities of a man and woman. Celebrated film-maker Lars von Trier once proclaimed Leth’s effort as perfect, and now takes an opportunity to imprint his own stamp on cinematic history.

At the beginning of the new millennium, von Trier dared Leth to recreate his past genius. The challenge: to complete five remakes of The Perfect Human. Each must conform to von Trier’s ever-changing rules – hence the title of this doco, The Five Obstructions.

The Perfect Human was essentially a study on human behaviour, but in this doco both film-makers push the original themes beyond the limits of convention – and sense.

The challenge is shot in a haphazard home-movie style, complete with incoherent chunks of inaudibility, shaky camera-work, and bad lighting. This joint effort between Leth and von Trier inspires instant and awesome levels of irritation. For a film about “the perfect film”, the effort is ironically poorly filmed.

The term “pretentious” is so often used to describe von Trier that it’s practically become a cliché, but when a description is so apt it shirks imagination.

Two minutes in and The Five Obstructions manages to elicit an unprecedented level of annoyance. Further viewing not only manages to sustain initial levels of irritation but elevates them. Dubiously lauded as a journey into film-making, The Five Obstructions certainly succeeds in generating a very particular kind of response.