The Third Man Scheme

By RICHARD CORLISS

TITLE: ZENTROPA

DIRECTOR: LARS VON TRIER

WRITERS: LARS VON TRIER and NIELS VORSEL

THE BOTTOM LINE: The staid European cinema comes alive with an epic as big and mysterious as the Continent.

There is a new style in European cinema -- finally. For three decades, since Michelangelo Antonioni and Robert Bresson made anomie fashionable, European directors have dreamed -- or nightmared -- small. Their movies are dyspeptic miniatures: people sitting at a kitchen table, silent, sullen, waiting for the worst. Everybody, on both sides of the camera, has the glums. The camerabatic dazzle of, say, the French New Wave is now politically incorrect -- as if displaying any effervescence of imagination would betray a yearning for Hollywood's technical and narrative know-how. So the European cinema has aged like a movie star who retired decades ago. The question isn't even, "When did she die?" Instead it's, "Oh, is she still alive?"

Zentropa gives signs that the answer is yes. This existential melodrama was originally known as Europa, and Danish director Lars von Trier's ambition is that vast: Continent-wide. Set on a German train rumbling through the rubble of World War II -- but suggesting the recent chaos of post-communist Europe -- Zentropa plays like a hallucinogenic remake of The Third Man. A naive American, Leo (Jean-Marc Barr), walks into a web of political duplicity spun by a desperate provocateuse (Barbara Sukowa), a cynical Allied officer (Eddie Constantine) and lots of supporting sharks and werewolves. And where is Harry Lime, the charming, murderous third man? Everywhere. Everyone has something to prove or hide -- everyone but Leo. Which makes him, in the movie's seen-it-all eyes, the real villain. The elemental crime is to take no side, to do nothing.

Von Trier will never be nailed on that rap. He passionately promotes himself and European movies. At last year's Cannes festival, when this film lost out to the Hollywood comedy Barton Fink, Von Trier threw a snit fit, angrily claiming that his movie was bolder and better. He was right. Zentropa plunders the film vocabulary -- back projection and superimposition, black-and-white with shrieks of color -- to anchor its weirdness in classical technique. The legerdemain reminds you of the artificial nature of movies even as it draws you back to the era when pictures seduced the audience into a communal trance.

Like The Nasty Girl from Germany, Toto le Heros from Belgium and Delicatessen from France, Zentropa finds movie energy in spiritual malaise. These films take their cue from the dystopic visions of Blade Runner and Brazil -- pictures set in the future but cluttered with decor from the film noir past. The imagery possesses a kind of dour voluptuousness: bleak and busy. Their crammed, skewed compositions excite the eye. These movies won't push Lethal 3 off the multiplex screen; they can't compete with Hollywood product. And that is the happy point. They are appealingly strange -- different from the American behemoths but, unlike most examples of European cine-minimalism, not less.

Zentropa is the strangest. It has the overweening will to be a masterpiece and the verve nearly to carry it off. Big, enthralling and, frankly, nuts, Zentropa gives notice that European cinema is alive and kicking, one more time.