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Manderlay
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- For the fictional estate, see Manderley; for the Burmese city, see Mandalay.
Manderlay is a sequel to the movie Dogville. It is the second part of Lars von Trier's trilogy USA - Land of Opportunities. Bryce Dallas Howard replaces Nicole Kidman in the role of Grace. The movie also features Willem Dafoe, Lauren Bacall and Chloe Sevigny.
Contents
- 1 Staging
- 2 Plot summary
- 3 Cast
- 4 External links
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Staging
The staging is very similar to Dogville. Shot on a sparsely dressed sound stage, Manderlay's mise en scene differs from its predecessor with the inclusion of horse, a mule, and a sandstorm. Like Dogville, Manderlay's action is confined to a small geographic area, in this case a plantation.
Plot summary
Set in the early 1930s, the film takes up the story of Grace (
Bryce Dallas Howard) and her father (
Willem Dafoe) after burning the town of Dogville at the end of the previous film. Grace and her father travel in convoy with a number of gunmen through rural
Alabama where they stop briefly outside a plantation called Manderlay. As the gangsters converse, a black woman emerges from Manderlay's front gates complaining that someone is about to be whipped for stealing a bottle of wine. Grace enters the plantation and learns that within it,
slavery persists, roughly 70 years after the
American Civil War and the
Emancipation Proclamation. Grace is appalled, and insists on staying at the plantation with a small contingent of gunmen and her father's lawyer, Joseph, in order to guarantee the slaves' safe transition to freedom. Shortly after Grace's father and the remaining gangsters depart, Mam (
Lauren Bacall), the master of the house, dies, but not before asking Grace to burn a notebook containing "Mam's Law," an exhaustive code of conduct for the entire plantation and all its inhabitants, free and slave. She reads the descriptions of each variety of slave that can be encountered, which include:
- Group 1: Proudy Nigger
- Group 2: Talkin' Nigger
- Group 4: Hittin' Nigger
- Group 5: Clownin' Nigger
- Group 7: Pleasing Nigger (also known as a chameleon, a person of the kind who can transform himself into exactly the type beholder would like to see)
- There are also groups for Weeping Niggers, Losin' Niggers, and Crazy Niggers
The principal seven divisions are each populated by a single adult slave at Manderlay, who congregate daily and converse on a "parade ground," with roman numerals of the numbers 1 through 7 designating where each slave stands. "Mam's Law" contains further provisions against the use of cash by slaves, or the felling of trees on the property for timber.
All of this information disgusts Grace, and inspires her to take charge of the plantation in order to punish the slave owners and prepare the slaves for life as free individuals. In order to guarantee that the former slaves will not continue to be exploited as
sharecroppers, Grace orders Joseph to draw up contracts for all Manderlay's inhabitants, institutionalizing a communistic form of cooperative living in which the white family works as slaves and the blacks collectively own the plantation and its crops. Throughout this process, Grace lectures all those present about the notions of
freedom and
democracy, using rhetoric entirely in keeping with the ideology of
racial equality which most contemporary Americans had yet to embrace. However as the film progresses, Grace fails to embed these principles in Manderlay's community in a form she considers satisfactory. Furthermore, her suggestions for improving the conditions of the community backfire on several occasions, such as using the surrounding trees for timber, which leaves the crops vulnerable to dust storms. After a year of such tribulations, the community harvests its cotton and successfully sells it, only to have the proceeds stolen by one of the former slaves. At this point it is revealed that "Mam's Law" was not conceived and enforced by Mam or any of the other whites, but instead by Wilhelm (
Danny Glover), the community's eldest member, as a means of maintaining the status quo after the abolition of slavery, protecting the blacks from a hostile outside world. As in many von Trier films, the
idealistic main character becomes frustrated by the reality he or she encounters.
Cast
