The director Lars von Trier knows how to make films in a minimalistic style and yet to achieve a great effect among the viewers. The opinions about Dogville are different from the ground up, because some love it, others want to leave the cinema.
The first impression is deceptive, because in the small American city it is not as quiet as it looks at first.
Lars von Trier builds on the imaginations and performances of the audience, because the film was limited to the most necessary and reminds of the epic theater of Bertholt Brecht.
His melancholy drama is the first part of a trilogy to be completed with the films "Washingten" and "Manderlay".
The story of Dogville plays in nine chapters that are framed by a prologue and epilogue. Lars von Trier reduces the implementation to the essentials. Everything takes place on a 50m x 50m stage.
The outlines of the houses are drawn on the floor, so the viewer would not be distracted from the important portrayal of the actors through the scenes. Only a few props make the stage look somewhat 3-dimensional.
The daytime is represented by a white or black background. The atmosphere is created only by light and sound, and an omniscient narrator also tells the audience the inconceivable events.
With this implementation, Trier follows the tradition of the epic theater of Berthold Brecht and goes an unusual way for the cinema. (1)
SYNOPSIS
It starts out with a small introduction of the play's characters; the town is not very large, only a few houses that populate "Elm Street" which has never really seen a real elm tree. Nothing much happens there.
Fugitive, Grace (Nicole Kidman), arrives in the isolated township of Dogville on the run from a team of gangsters. With some encouragement from Tom (Paul Bettany), the self-appointed town spokesman, the little community agrees to hide her and in return, Grace agrees to work for them. However, when a search sets in, the people of Dogville demand a better deal in exchange for the risk of harbouring poor Grace and she learns the hard way that in this town, goodness is relative. But Grace has a secret and it is a dangerous one. (2)
The story of the humanity of people located in a lost town where "quiet neighbors", "ordinary people" and a person who is on the run, seeking a hideout or asylum - turns into emotional rape and ruin the idea that a man has a sense of compassion .
There is a little (no) limit between decency and privacy, humanity and goodness, charity and exploitation, supply and blackmail, help and manipulation. The one who needs help becomes a slave!
Because, the misconception is that something is given for nothing! There is no veresity in the material world. Only interest. And they are charged to the end. And they are being billed to the end. To blood, to slavery, if there is no other way ("Manderlay" as the continuation of "Dogville"). Those who disagree with it should be honestly asked if they would rather be murderers or killed? Would they live or die?
People have built the world to their own measure, not to God. And Dogville is built like that. As a place where people live knowing that the faces they see in the mirror are not theirs. This is normal, not because their intentions and motives from which everything originates not what they represent.
Mimicry (adaptation) as the basis of survival is not a necessity but a choice of people. Motives? Selfishness! Unscrupulousness! Benefit! Thw sacred trinity (suddenly) of walking homo sapiens.
I could not even say that this film is a pessimistic look at the human race. "Dogville" is just a picture of the monsters close to our skin and coming out in moments when our real nature comes to the temptation to say something about itself. (3)
''How could she ever hate them for what was at bottom merely their weakness? She would probably have done things like those to be fallen her if she had lived in one of these houses. To measure them by her own yardstick as her father put it. Would she not, in all honesty, have done the same as Chuck and Vera and Ben and Mrs Henson and Tom and all these people in their houses? Grace paused. -
And all of a sudden she knew the answer to her question all too well. If she had acted like them she could not have defended a single one of her actions and could not have condemned them harshly enough. It was as if her sorrow and pain finally assumed their rightful place. No. What they had done was not good enough. And if one had the power to put it to right it was one's duty to do so - for the sake of other towns, for the sake of humanity. And not least for the sake of the human being that was grace herself.''
(Narrator, Dogville)
(1) https://www.rofmagazine.com/dogville/
(2) Cinema.com, Dogville (2003) Synopsis
(3) PULSE, Dogvil – Lars fon Trir