Bodil Jørgensen makes vulnerable people believable even when the film around them strains for effect. We rate her unforced acting and comic precision; The Idiots shows how much she can give a film we find wanting.
Fi1m perspective
In The Idiots (1998), Bodil Jørgensen makes Karen believable while the commune’s imitations of disability grow increasingly tiresome. She gives us someone to take an interest in without asking us to approve of the experiment. We cared about Karen because Jørgensen’s unforced acting made it possible to forget, briefly, how insistently the film was trying to repel us. Anne Louise Hassing’s Susanne offers a similar reason to persist, and together they make the strongest case for Lars von Trier’s approach. The acting sustains an interest in these people that the premise keeps threatening to undo.
Karen was Jørgensen’s breakthrough, but the subsequent work makes it too limiting to treat her chiefly as a von Trier actor. As Tina in Anders Thomas Jensen’s black comedy The Green Butchers (2003), she moved into another strand of Danish ensemble work. Later parts include Ellen Abbott in the absurdist family comedy Men & Chicken (2015) and a lead in All Inclusive (2015). Television in Badehotellet and revue work in Rytteriet widen that picture. Comic timing belongs near the centre of an account of her work, not in a footnote to the serious acting.
The women she is often cast to play have to cope with grief, social expectations or absurdity, and being vulnerable does not make them incapable of enduring it. That is a useful basis for tragicomedy, where an actor needs to take distress seriously without making every scene solemn. Her dramatic intensity and comic precision suit work that asks for both. Karen gives us the clearest evidence of the dramatic side: Jørgensen allows an emotional connection without making the commune’s experiment any more defensible.
Our reservation is about what von Trier does with that connection. Naturalistic acting cannot stop the imitations of disability becoming repetitive, nor supply the ideas the film lacks. Jørgensen is a strong reason to persist with The Idiots, but we would not recommend it on her presence alone. Seek out the comic work too; Karen should not be mistaken for the whole of what she does.
Biography
Bodil Jørgensen is a Danish actress. She trained at Statens Teaterskole, graduating in 1990, and began her career in experimental theatre before moving into film and television.
She is best known for her role as Karen in Lars von Trier's The Idiots (1998), which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and earned her the Bodil Award and Robert Award for Best Actress. Other notable film roles include Tina in The Green Butchers (2003), the bartender in Terribly Happy (2008), and appearances in In a Better World (2010), Love Is All You Need (2012) and Men & Chicken (2015). She has also worked extensively in Danish television series.
