Epidemic (1987)

Such a frustrating disappointment

Excellent but underrated film

Excellent adaptation.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Everything gas to be minimal, and minimal is everything. Black and white of course. Minimal camera, film, format, special effects, if any. Everything has to be really happening the way you see it, or nearly that way. Because the end is not exactly that really real and realistic.A virus destroys the scenario that was on a floppy disk of one of those first text processors from before GUIs and PCs. So Lars and Niels have five days to produce a scenario and they are no longer interested by the one they have just lost, "The cop and the whore," which would have been a remake of "Element of Crime." So they start a new scenario from scratch in five days or so. I guess the virus got into them like a gremlin into some computer and they decide to get into the description of some epidemic in modern times. The details are not really interesting. What is important is the treatment of the subject. If you have to only show real images and situations, how can you show a modern plague on the model of Milano under attack from the Black Death in 1348, bricking up in their houses the families that were infected for them to die inside their houses and not contaminate the others. Pure egotistic selfish absurdity anyway. Those viruses were transported by rats that do not know what bricks are and they can always go through if necessary, and they were probably already out. And the virus is like Father Christmas: it can go up and down chimneys.Then they can go in archive underground with walls totally infected with some saltpeter like ulmcers in the plaster popping up regularly. That looks like some plague too. And then they get some facts that are told about this old plague. And if you cannot really show the new modern plague, at least you can show the scenario writers writing their scenario. And you can get into their minds and listen to what they see in their mind's eye, how they see the film, the characters, etc. So there are a few cameos about that fictitious plot that ends in the most absurd way, but you'll have to discover it yourself.To add some modern realistic flavor they have one man telling what his mother told him about the way a whole set of people were parked or packed in some hole full of water and made to die slowly by the Nazis. We can believe that, in fact we can believe any horror about the Nazis. So no problem and we have seen so many images of these horrible events that we can put such pictures on the words. The film is only showing the self-imposed torture of the man telling what his mother had told him just before dying. And we can also send the two scenario writers on a quick trip to Germany and have some infernal vision of cables, highways, tunnels, and all those means of transportation that would be the best vectors for any epidemic in modern times. Our cars are modern rats in a way. And I will say nothing about buses, trains, planes, and what the Canadians call char-à-bancs.And that is what Lars von Trier is doing all the time, shifting us from any period of time and any place to any other period of time and any other place. He even includes a pathology department in some hospital and a dissection to reveal some glandular tissue change, small little pea-looking globules that develop no one knows why and how. Fifteen cases yesterday, mind you. Once again we are in for a séance of grossing out. But the final one is a champion in the genre, in the style, in the ambition to make us sick.Lars von Trier uses a trick he has already used in "Element of Crime" and that is hypnosis. If you cannot take the producer of the film who is on a quick visit to Denmark to the plague itself evoked in the 12 page scenario, or rather sketch, you can bring a woman (of course it has to be woman, don't ask me why, but it has to be a woman) who is hypnotized by a man (and it has to be a man here too, don't ask me why but it has to be a man) and she is thus projected into the epidemic film and she describes the epidemic, what she sees, to the point of catching the disease, though it happens to her after it had happened to the first scenario writer, probably Lars if it is not Niels, and she develops, like him on his arm, ulcers on her neck and she gets crazy and she punctures the ulcers with a fork and she kills herself. How's that as for a demonstration of the power of the plague, of the film seen as a contagious and killing fatal lethal deadly epidemic?Altogether I am still not convinced as for that film technique that illustrates a famous manifesto cosigned by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, Dogme 95 and the Vow of Chastity. But what I am becoming convinced of is that if you try to only give true real material facts on the screen, you are spreading around the matter necessary to psychoanalyze you, which I hate. So I won't try to see how sick Lars von Trier is. But [...]Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

spoilers I liked this movie for the idea which probably comes into focus best in this scene in which the leader of the two writers sketches out a plan for the film in paint on the wall (which is very hilarious).The way we talk about story ideas as we refine them to make the more ideal film is a little troubling! We develop stories such that they should conform to these supposedly universal values, essentially. The scenes of the film within the film are mostly completely awful, aside from the sheer photography and high contrast posterized look and let us never forget that the title with a copyright symbol is displayed throughout the entire film (nice!). As far as I'm concerned the scene at the end with the woman having her hypnotic freakout was a pretty damn cheap and much less than effective way to usher in the long predicted finish to the film. It was surely worth watching for what it had to say about what we want to see in films and why, as sarcastic as all of it was. personally I couldn't fail to be amused.Funny no matter how hard LvT pushes away at certain parameters he so often relies on these simple structures: day 1 day 2 etc. and never forget: women being tormented, which is obviously his favorite thing in the universe!

Of course, you gotta be a masochist to enjoy some people's genius - you know that if you bear with them they will take you to new levels of perception. With Lars von Trier, the voyage is often hilarious. Epidemic is funny. Funny, in a Gummo kind of way: the characters are real, reality is eerie, and we laugh to break the tension; funny in a the characters say amusing things kind of way (preacher: "this bible is in goddamned Latin"); and funny in an Andy Kaufman screwing with the audience (yes, you) kind of way. Make no mistake: you will suffer. If you are afraid, stay away from horror movies, ya pansy!This movie also features some great aesthetic distance! It's bold!

I like Von Trier's films and this one and "The Idiots" seem to me the ones in which he achieves through both the way they are shot and the plot in itself, a high quality of personal artistic expression.Concentrating on "Epidemic", I think the contrast between the black and white parts and the "story" is intriguing and effective, visually disturbing and helping to create the symbolic meaning the viewer could take from this movie.To me, beyond more evident interpretations about predestination, Dreyer-like bad and evil explanations, I believe Von Trier -with the help of, for instance, bleak houses, rundown sourroundings and disease- tries to tell us that the world we're living is infected by a growing disease, living its marks in EACH ONE OF US, making Europe in general a dull and heartless place to live, a world killing us very slowly and with it our soul, our sensibility and our ability to feel. Like the final song : "we all fall down".Against the complacency and cynism of much of the cultural expression nowadays, I think Von Trier's work is an exemple. That is why I recommend "Epidemic" to IMDB users.