Danish film director Lars von Trier has done it again. Last month, the UK reviews for his extraordinary new film, Dancer in the Dark, were so savage that the distributors issued a guarantee that, if people hated the movie after 30 minutes, they would get their money back. Of the first 7,600 people, apparently only five demanded a refund.
At Cannes, after von Trier bagged the overall Palme D'Or and Bjork landed Best Actress, it proved hugely divisive. Bjork critics howled with a vehemence nearly as disturbing as the movie itself.
Dancer is a difficult film to watch, with its reeling, hand-held camera, relentless suspense and lurching emotional effects. At the centre is Bjork as a child-like Czech immigrant and single mother in the US. Her hallucinatory immersion in US musicals such as The Sound of Music is her only comfort in life, while her encroaching blindness leaves her open to appalling exploitation and menace. Bjork's performance is frighteningly committed, while von Trier's emergency-room camera scarcely strays from closeups of her face.
It's also a glorious hames of a movie, with its pompous overture, its overkill of 100 cameras for the cornball musical numbers, and the cast improvising in foreign languages. But it carries a momentous emotional whack, with some great adrenalin in Bjork's soundtrack, her yowling cat-voice soaring over the digital-age concrete music.
The musical numbers come thicker and faster as the movie rolls on, and it ends up almost needing them, so arduous does the film become - with von Trier's tear-jerking, transgressive melodrama producing tragedy at its most intense.
For the past few years, von Trier has operated out of his Filmbyen - Filmtown - a remote complex of nondescript, decommissioned Cold War military buildings south-west of Copenhagen. Zentropa, the company von Trier set up in 1992 with Peter Aalbaek Jensen, now owns a long row of yellow-brick buildings there: some used as production offices and equipment stores; others now being rebuilt as studios, or to rehouse the editing suites, which operate nearby.
Building 58 is the nerve centre of Zentropa's hub of independent film production. There I meet the 44-year-old von Trier, a handsome, twinkly, surprisingly diminutive character who, once he has managed to bumble outside, drives me in a red sportscar to his "office", less than 300 metres away.
It's actually more like a fun room. A pinball machine sits in one corner and I have to remove curtains and an empty tequila bottle before I can sit down. A colour print of Lord Baden-Powell graces the wall and other pictures include the great Danish film director Carl Dreyer, and von Trier's four children in a bath.
Von Trier flops onto a frayed leather sofa, occasionally rearranging himself like a cat trying to find a warm spot. Although endlessly genial, he is maddeningly unwilling to talk about his films.
Dancer completes a "melodramatic trilogy" of films involving sacrificial, otherworldly child-women characters. In Breaking the Waves, the young child-woman Bess (Emily Watson) displays shocking loyalty to her paralysed husband by engaging in degrading encounters with other men.
Then there is the meek Karen (Bodil Jorgensen) in Idiots, who deals with her tragedy by joining a group of Danes getting in touch with their "inner idiot" through the outrageous practice of acting as a spastic, or retard.
"I've been talking quite a lot about this sacrifice . . ." says von Trier, eventually, "but to go as far as these characters go, you have to be extremely stubborn. All the films I've made have been about idealism. And while men tend to stop, these women go all the way."
There were certainly tensions between Bjork and von Trier in generating her performance in Dancer. The pair don't communicate now, other than through media interviews. In one interview, Bjork describes working with von Trier as "Napoleon meets Pippi Longstocking". The distancing may have something to do with von Trier's habit of using therapeutic techniques to induce grief and hysteria, while filming non-stop.
"She threatened to walk out, and did once. We had just borrowed 40 million kroner so, Jesus Christ, if she had disappeared . . . I actually fired her a couple of times, and she wouldn't accept it. Still, the reason I chose her was because she has a mind of her own."
Dancer is set in the US in the 1960s, although the exteriors were shot in Sweden. Von Trier, who has a severe phobia about flying, and rarely travels, says: "I'm inspired now to do a new trilogy that only takes place in the United States, because I've never been there. It's like Kafka's Amerika. I believe that the talents you have, you must cling to. And one of my talents is that I have not been in America."
Another, of course, is that von Trier is the grandaddy of the Dogme Manifesto, the pared-back methodology of film-making involving mandatory hand-held cameras, purely live sound, no artificial lighting or props - rules set out in the Dogme Vows of Chastity, which he and Vinterberg drew up in a cacklesome 25 minutes in March 1995.
There are now more than 15 Dogme films worldwide, including Harmony Korine's Julian Donkey- boy and Jose Luis Marques' Fuckland, a cheeky Argentinian film which involved taking concealed cameras onto the Falkland Islands. But the bedrock Dogme films remain Vinterberg's superb Festen, von Trier's Idiots, Sren Kragh-Jacobsen's Mifunes, and Kristian Levring's The King Is Alive, due out here early next year.
Last March, they set up a Dogme Secretariat, and to have your movie certified as a Dogme film, all you have to do is to sign a sworn statement that you have adhered to the Vows of Chastity - and pay a fee.
Certainly Dancer is no Dogme film although, like Idiots, it is shot totally on high-end digital video, with von Trier himself shooting close to the action. "Normally a director would be behind a monitor somewhere, but this is like going to the market if you're preparing a meal; you keep discovering all sorts of possibilities.
"I have one-hour videotapes, so we film every scene in one hour, more or less. We just take the scene again and again from the top without stopping, while I make little changes. It becomes looser and looser."
Von Trier is blithe nowadays about Dogme, but when I remark that the notion of Vows of Chastity is rather Catholic, he says: "I am a Catholic - aren't you?"