I first viewed "Zentropa" in 1992 in the Jean Cocteau cinema in Santa Fe, New Mexico (the same theater where I saw another black-and-white oddity, "Shadows and Fog.") "Zentropa" is both frustrating, horrific, absorbing, infrequently comical and consistently pure spectacle. It also works, as most great films do, as a slow-moving, almost death-like trance and nobody is better at putting you in that out-of-body state than Max von Sydow who does the stirring narration.
The narration is not a conventional voice-over - it is more of a set of instructions for our most peculiar protagonist (and in a way, for us, the audience). The mild-mannered, polite protagonist is Leopold Kessler (Jean-Marc Barr), an American brought to Germany in 1945 after the war is over. He is assigned to work as a sleeping car conductor and is related to his Uncle Kessler, a strict, impatient, by-the-book German (Ernst-Hugo Jaregard), who nonetheless expects his nephew to follow rules. The train is named Zentropa only though this is no ordinary train - this was a doomed mode of transportation to send Jews to the deadly concentration camps. There is an alluring heiress, Katharina (Barbara Sukowa), who is riding the train and is the daughter of Max Hartmann (Jørgen Reenberg), who owns the train. Max is no saint since his very own train company was complicit in war crimes. He's saddled with guilt to the point that he commits suicide in the bathtub after being falsely cleared by a Jew he saved.
"Zentropa" is not for average audiences or even for, a term I loathe, "art film" enthusiasts. "Zentropa" is too strange, too melodic, too otherworldly from a narration standpoint, and far too European in its leisurely paced story though it briefly harks back to 1950's melodramatic romances with lyrical musical notes. Directed with visual brush strokes using rear-screen projection and black-and-white with splashes of occasional color, "Zentropa" is never less than mesmerizing. Almost every shot is layered with complex focal length shots that are quite unique (though not nearly as thickly layered as "Prospero's Books," released the same year), from an isolated yellow telegram with a man in the bathtub in black-and-white. It is exemplary filmmaking, especially in the opening scenes where we witness the emergence of the Zentropa train car being pulled with ropes by adults and children.
Ultimately, the movie serves to function Leopold as some sort of powerless antihero who is given a reluctant mission - to blow up the train! The war is never really over in Trier's "Zentropa" as the heiress turns out to be a Werwolf and an assassination even takes place on board the train involving a child shooting an older man! Perhaps Trier is saying that no matter who you were in Germany during the worst genocide of the 20th century, you were guilty by association. We are in submerged in the film's hypnotic final scenes and Leopold has no way out. Neither does the audience.
