An Obstruction I Wouldn't Mind...

I may end up eating crow later on if this turns out not to be true, but the idea of Lars von Trier pulling a "Five Obstructions" on Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro is too wild not to mull over.

For those of you who aren't familiar with The Five Obstructions (and didn't bother clicking on the link above), Lars von Trier challenged Jørgen Leth to remake his own short film, "The Perfect Human", five times with various impediments (or, as the title suggests, "obstructions").

The rumor du jour coming out of the Berlin Film Festival is that von Trier has challenged (and Scorsese and DeNiro have accepted) a similar challenge to remake Taxi Driver 34 years later. Personally speaking, I find this fascinating because the long standing rumor on the part of director and actor was that they were mulling over revisiting Travis Bickle - much older, but no more stable - someday.

As sequels go, it was a "probably never going to happen" but "wouldn't that be neat" idea. In all practicality, there's almost no way a sequel to Taxi Driver could work (although it could be argued that if anyone could do it, Scorsese could on the roll he's been lately) but then again it wasn't even a real consideration. Kinda like a full length cut of Metropolis.... oh.

But I have to say, this idea is even crazier. With von Trier egging them on, and dictating the rules of the game by which they have to play, I can only wonder what this Taxi Driver would look like. It has all the potential in the world to be a disaster commercially, but the artistic ramifications are fascinating. I can think of a handful of directors who remade their own films (Ozu's Floating Weeds, Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much, DeMille's The Ten Commandments, Haneke's Funny Games), but there's something so iconic about Taxi Driver, so quintessentially 70s neo-noir that I wonder how to approach the film in 2010.

Certainly, von Trier will have a number of peculiar obstructions set in place, one of which - I hope - is that it cannot be temporally the same. I can only imagine what New York (assuming it is New York) a 67 year-old Travis Bickle would find himself in, or how DeNiro would play the seething rage in the body of an older man. It's almost like Peter Boyle in Joe, but almost twice as old.

And yet, there's something compelling about the idea of the same film playing out with such wildly different variations. Bickle's misplaced rage, no longer the folly of a young man, but embodied with greater life experience, more time to simmer. I should imagine that some stipulation would include most of the surviving cast (hopefully in different capacities) - Harvey Keitel, Jodie Foster, Albert Brooks, Cybill Shepherd. It would be funny if von Trier insisted on playing the Scorsese role in the film. Too many possibilities to mull over.

The concept is ripe with possibilities, and while I suspect that something so audacious will never come to pass, even with the star power pull involved, this is at last a remake with some drive behind it that transcends the cheap and easy methodology of contemporary studios.