Wild Kingdom

Lars lightens up in Part II

by Peter Keough

THE KINGDOM, PART II, Directed by Lars von Trier and Morten Arnfred. Written by Lars von Trier and Niels Vørsel. With Ernst-Hugo Järegård, Kirsten Rolffes, Holger Juul Hansen, Søren Pilmark, Ghita Nørby, Jens Okking, Birthe Neumann, Otto Brandenburg, Erik Wedersøe, Birgitte Raaberg, Peter Mygind, and Udo Kier. An October Films release. At the Brattle, June 19 through 21.

"Does it mean anything -- this silliness?" asks one of the pair of Down-syndrome-afflicted dishwashers serving as the cryptic Greek chorus in Lars von Trier's The Kingdom II? It might not be the right question to ask when Trier is in his more frivolous, less ponderous mode, as he is in this second installment from the apocalyptic soap opera he originally made for Danish television.

With such prodigies as a peripatetic severed head and Udo Kier as a giant baby woven into its comic-book tapestry, meaning in this Kingdom defers to madcap high spirits. The themes of "good and evil . . . order and chaos" are juggled with more humor than portent this time around, and though the lofty nonsense is occasionally forced and flat, The Kingdom II remains a tour de force of macabre, comic inventiveness and baroque narrative skill.

The high spirits, as viewers of the first Kingdom will recall, are quite literal. Built on a swamp in whose astringent waters pagan workers once bleached cloth, the state-of the-art medical complex known as the Kingdom includes supernatural intrusions among its dirty laundry. In the struggle between modern rationalism and primal insanity, the beleaguered staff seem to be drifting ineluctably toward the latter.

Stig Helmer (Ernst-Hugo Järegård), the arrogant Swedish neurosurgeon last seen leaving for Haiti to investigate voodoo methods of dealing with his enemies, has returned with a zombie drug and an obsession with his feces. Ineffectual administrator Professor Moesgaard (Holger Juul Hansen) is dealing with bureaucratic pressures by covertly seeking help: he's re-enacting birth with "fire in the belly"-style therapist Ole (Erik Wedersøe). Black-marketeer and M*A*S*H-like anarchist Krogen (Larry Bird look-alike Søren Pilmark) has taken a Dr.-Kevorkian-via-Third-Reich eugenics turn after a close brush with the crematorium, and malingerer and would-be medium Mrs. Drusse (Kirsten Rolffes) has her wish for a prolonged hospital stay and contact with the spirit world fulfilled when the ambulance participating in the staff "Ghost Rider" betting pool knocks her into intensive care.

Those are just a few of the dozen or so plot lines that proliferate and intertwine with manic abandon. At the heart of it all is Little Brother (Udo Kier), the half-human, half-demonic progeny of Dr. Judith Petersen (Birgitte Raaberg) and Aage Krüger, the deceased former regent of the Kingdom who's now an incubus in the service of the Devil. Krüger's unspeakably evil deeds performed in the name of science six decades before seemed to have been laid to rest in The Kingdom I. In fact, his wickedness (as well as his potential for redemption) has been incarnated in an infant who can talk and crawl from birth and grows with astonishing speed into a 10-foot-long abomination of snaking spindly limbs, carapaced pot belly, and treacly demeanor tied to a frame to prevent him from collapsing under his own weight. He's a metaphor for civilization on the brink -- a fusion of instinct and reason, past sins and future doom, vastly overgrown and artificially sustained. Or perhaps for Trier's creation itself, as it spins its yarns with abandon, a combination of creepy innocence and grotesque morbidity.

But there's method to the seeming madness, as one tangent connects with another to propel the tale forward with a breathlessness that makes for not a dull moment in its nearly five-hour length. Although some of the fancies fail to take flight (Mrs. Drusse's airborne missions to penetrate the various mysteries, for example), most reverberate with sudden, clarifying serendipity. And though familiarity makes the assaultive style -- erratic handheld photography, jump cuts, optical trickery -- less jarring, it makes the characters more endearing. They're like the characters on long-running TV shows: you start to worry about their fates, especially since they're freighted with such millennial import.

What are the Birds of Passage in a flap about? What revelation will Christmas bring? How will Trier resolve the multi-level cliffhanger he leaves us with when he returns in The Kingdom III? Appearing himself at the end, à la the Master of Suspense in Alfred Hitchcock Presents, the director seems a little bored with the "slalom course" he's set up for himself. When it comes to walking the fine line between silliness and meaning, however, few are surer-footed.