Manderlay

An hour later and I am finally able to make this post. Some weird corrup­tion as a result of Fire­fox 2.0s cache when switching bet­ween proxy’s led to all goo­gle ser­vi­ces and spe­ci­fi­cally their login pro­ce­du­res from fai­ling to load, thus I could not login to Blog­ger. Era­sing my pri­vate data from Fire­fox and star­ting over fixed the pro­blem until it occurs again.

Any­way, Man­der­lay is Lars von Trier’s sequel to Dog­vi­lle, a per­so­nal favou­rite. It sees Grace and her father, on their trip home from Dog­vi­lle pass Man­der­lay where a black woman pleads for help as a slave is about to be bea­ten. Grace steps in and libe­ra­tes all, enfor­ces democ­racy and sets about impro­ving the Man­der­lay com­mu­nity. The film con­se­quen­tially follows the events that occur the­reaf­ter and the route the small com­mu­nity takes. I don’t want to delve into the poli­ti­cal dis­cus­sions that arise from this film’s conc­lu­sions, I merely wish to urge you towards watching this monu­ment so that you may approach the table of debate with some inter­pre­ta­tions of your own.

Man­der­lay is mas­ter­ful and bri­lliant. It also stars the delight­ful Bryce Dallas Howard and Willem Dafoe:

Grace and her father

The ori­gi­nal and bare­bo­nes set

Grace Mar­ga­ret Mulli­gan: Dam­mit Wilhelm, they’re not free. That’s what mat­ters.
Wilhelm: I’d call that a phi­lo­sophi­cal argument.