Von Trier the Fraudulent?ro;”back so soon?

I WANT TO banalize you," Lars Von Trier tells filmmaker Jorgen Leth in The Five Obstructions. It's a confession he could also be making to his own audience. Von Trier wants to destroy cinema; who'd guess that he would succeed half as well as he's done, getting financers, curators, critics and audiences around the world to proclaim his ornery, backwards, pseudo-esthetics?

The Five Obstructions is a playful exposition of the Von Trier process. He corrals fellow Dane Leth to submit his own 1967 film The Perfect Human to the Von Trier treatment. Leth agrees to remake his film five times, each effort done to the set of limitations Von Trier imposes. This is almost a reenactment of the Dogme 95 hoax in which Von Trier encouraged a group of young Danish directors to accept a list of arbitrary rules (which Von Trier himself then broke), including a ludicrous "vow of chastity" that was meant to pledge frugality. Only the sense of playfulness is new in The Five Obstructions. It suggests that taskmaster Lars, sipping vodka and insisting that the bowl of caviar between him and Jorgen be eaten with a bone spoon, is a prankster.

Yet an almost evil stupidity emanates from Von Trier's puckish manner. Why subject Leth (and us) to this meaningless exercise? "I'm not perverse," Leth retorts, but he follows instructions anyway. Surprisingly, he comes up with actual films (not Dogme-style video) that are variations on his original themes. In the end, the trickster wins. Each remake is essentially banal. Leth has forgotten that when he first made The Perfect Human, it was a moment of rich, purposeful experimentation in European cinema. He was responding to Godard's Vivre Sa Vie and Bergman's Persona, proving to the world a new way to make and look at movies. But 37 years later, movie culture is not interested in experimentation, and neither is Von Trier.

The Five Obstructions will fool only those film students envious of filmmakers who are lousy with the wherewithal to do anything they please. (Von Trier sends Leth to India, Cuba, Haiti, Belgium, Venezuela.) Such covetousness won't do students any good. They'll only misconstrue Von Trier and Leth's privilege to make movies about nothing as the essence of creative freedom. This folly should expose the Von Trier mystique. At this jaded point in movie history, the culture rejects movies with meaning. Banalization rules. In one of Leth's shorts, he poses on a depressing, crowded street in India, dressed in a tuxedo and eating a fancy dinner while a crowd of destitute natives stands behind a screen watching. Not a comment on global inequity, it's an image of convoluted, show-offy indifference. (If there were a moral behind it, you might call it a critique of Cold Mountain.)

Von Trier proves the perfect fraud for an era that no longer believes in art. Suckers for his "destructive" impulse, the visual crudeness of digital video and the negation of photographic beauty, still remain uninterested in the assault on social convention that once drove avant-garde experimentation. Von Trier's decadence represents the triumph of careerism, the fetishizing of film commerce-that's why he plays the role of producer-God. Von Trier doesn't cathect the phenomenon of cinema; his banal ideas belabor it. But even casual study of regular film production systems would impart more discipline, more ingenuity than The Five Obstructions. Here, sadism substitutes the pleasure of imagination. As Von Trier tells Leth, "I'm going to have to punish you. Now we're going to ruin your film," their talking-heads confab remakes My Dinner with Andre as an s&m movie.

NOTHING IN THE religious satire Saved! is as profound as the Morrissey tune "I Have Forgiven Jesus." That song, a fundamentalist curveball, questions belief while clinging to it as the access to passion and a gauge of how the world works. Saved! takes a different, insultingly simpleminded approach to the conflict of Christian behavior in a godless world. Flipping the contrast of good and evil so that freedom opposes religion, this teen comedy aims for unserious pop yet wants points for bucking the system.

Director Brian Dannelly (who co-wrote the script with Michael Urban) sets the story at American Eagle Christian High School-an absurdly overloaded name. Why not just call it The School of Mock? Dannelly's broad, obvious conceit begins with Mary (Jena Malone) giving up her virginity to save-that is, "change"-her gay boyfriend, who is due to get shipped off to a reeducation camp. Her disillusionment and unexpected pregnancy pits her against stridently devout classmate Hilary Faye (Mandy Moore). It's really just the old high school popularity contest (never mind the baby). Mary and several other misfits-Roland, a paraplegic sulker (Macauly Culkin), and Cassandra, a trouble-making outsider who happens to be Jewish (Eva Amurri)-challenge Hilary Faye's cadre of prim lackeys, the Christian Jewels.

Saved! has little to do with what teenagers might actually believe in. (They all lack political interests.) True faith, as New Order once sang about, is beyond the scope of Dannelly and Urban's fatuous side-taking. They confuse traditional fear of God with resentment toward authority. That shallowness might pass for subversiveness in indie circles, but it really resembles those exploitive 50s rock movies; recent political controversies of the unreligious left against the religious right are reduced to insipid can't-stop-the-rock commercial archetypes. (The unhip schoolkids chant "Let's get our Christ on!" and "Let's kick it Jesus style!") Unlike the high school formats of Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club, which captured adolescent anxieties with bright, accurate language, Saved! never looks too closely at soul-deep desire. That compulsion is what inspired Morrissey and New Order to slyly evoke divinity. They forced pop music to relate to the big question.

Dumbing down the culture wars, Saved! ignores basic spiritual inquiry. That's why Mary and Hilary Faye, despite having common backgrounds and experiences, never look at each other sympathetically. One's a hapless working-class everyteen, the other's a dogmatic middle-class ogre. (The most devoted flunky in Hilary Faye's "girl gang for Jesus" is Tia, played by Heather Matarazzo, who starred as the nerd in Welcome to the Dollhouse, Todd Solondz's teen satire made before he discovered complexity.) When Hilary Faye blocks some sexually undeclared teens from attending the prom, she protests, "There's no room here for moral ambiguity!" It might have been a good line if the moviemakers hadn't already demonstrated it.

Dannelly's true intentions are screwed-up and covert: The opening scene of Mary's boyfriend being saved from drowning announces its agenda through titillating shots of his hunky rescuer. The first campus scene features a Christian icon that's sure to be toppled later. Therein Saved! soft-peddles its gay vs. religion thesis, emphasizing comedy that is unrelated to complex feelings. A scene in which each character prays for vain wishes bowdlerizes the great prayer sequence in Election that, rather than simply bash religion, exposes the characters' delusions. Saved! succumbs to fashionable hugger-mugger rather than represent actual moral dilemma. All Dannelly and Urban know is that Christianity makes a risible movie target-the only one Hollywood permits. In an age when sarcasm takes the place of wit, many people accept this as motivation enough.

Between the time Saved! won acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival in January and its current national release, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ happened. Now the makers of Saved! use a careful publicity tactic, promoting the film as "pro-faith." In cynical Hollywood, that term is suddenly respected as pro-box-office. So Saved! is being spun to attract a recently discovered devotional demographic (and to avoid a backlash).

It's doubtful that there's any audience for a movie with such divided aims. Saved! is clearly designed to deride Christian orthodoxy while catering to secularists. But Saved! eventually trivializes the nondenominational ideas it promotes. Cassandra comes off less a brash liberator than a Courtney Love slouch, and wheelchair-confined Roland (who is Hilary Faye's brother) commits family betrayal without blinking. These politically correct "redeemed" characters are essentially smug jerks, braying hipper-than-thou attitudes. Sad-eyed Jena Malone never rescues Mary from being a drudge; her lack of chastity is almost sanctimonious. And Mandy Moore, who seemed to embody Christian conviction with something like grace in A Walk to Remember, sells out to silliness. Saved! needs the miracle of skepticism tempered with unaffiliated compassion of John Waters' best films; otherwise it's damned.