By Chuck Stephens

IT MAY SEEM perverse to predicate the making of a film on the very things most filmmakers struggle to avoid: a cantankerous producer who goes out of his way to aggravate his put-upon director, for example, or a set of production restrictions that include filming in the most miserable place on earth and a mandate that the final product aspire to nothing more than absolute "crap." Those who've followed the career of Lars von Trier – the directorial great Dane recently famous for making a fire hydrant out of America in Dogville – may, however, have grown well accustomed to such aesthetic interference patterns. Von Trier, after all, has built both a personal filmography and a dogma for a young generation of digi-cinéastes out of aesthetic denials, formalist refusals, and other sorts of potholes in the road to the multiplex.

But never before has von Trier managed to put his penchant for restraints and restrictions to as gleefully liberating an end result as he does in The Five Obstructions, wherein the increasingly aged enfant terrible entreats the elder statesman of Danish experimental filmmaking, Jørgen Leth, to remake his 1967 short "The Perfect Human," which von Trier claims to have studied at least 20 times while still a fledgling film student. Leth, in turn, claims he made the original short – a whimsical study of a tuxedoed man who dances, dines, and listlessly desires to sort out the various mysteries of his elliptical existence – as both a reaction against a particular strain of Danish "social problem" documentaries and a "polemic against imperfection" generally. The film's catch, however, is that Leth's object of interest is only "perfect" in his all-too-human imperfections: filled with frivolous energy and romantic confusion, this perfectly unperfected human makes a mantra of his ambiguous admission that "today I experienced something that I hope to understand in a few days."

As the new film's title indicates, von Trier induces Leth to re-create "The Perfect Human" – which the former describes as "a little gem that we are now going to ruin" – not once but five times, each according to increasingly irritating sets of strictures, all designed as "therapeutic" interventions against Leth's various penchants for emotional distance, long-take observation, and icy formal elegance. For the first of them, von Trier dictates that Leth remake the originally set-bound short on location in Cuba, using no sets whatsoever, and that every shot be restricted in duration to a blip-length maximum of no more than 12 frames. For the second of his obstructed reinventions, Leth must shoot in the most miserable place he can think of (he chooses Bombay's squalid red-light district, Falkland Road), but refrain from actually photographing the misery that surrounds the director and his crew. Each new petticoat seems more perverse than the last, and just when number three's injunction that Leth enjoy "complete freedom" seems the worst of von Trier's structuring curses, number four demands that he remake "The Perfect Human" in the one form both filmmakers claim most to abhor – as a cartoon. And yet, for every obstacle von Trier tosses in his former mentor's path, the always initially exasperated Leth manages to make an ally of adversity: each new remake contains elegant solutions to the most adverse of impermissibilities.

At once a self-mocking documentary about the filmmaking process generally, a portrait of the very different attitudes and aptitudes beneath von Trier's and Leth's working methods in particular, and a feature-length experimental narrative that takes much pleasure in withholding as much information as it manages to kaleidoscope together, The Five Obstructions merges high-concept comedy with potentially ego-bruising psychodrama, resulting in a film that seems somehow both cryptic and enlightening. Even the movie's title is a masterstroke of misdirection, given that the minor obstructions imposed on each of the five remakes actually serve to camouflage the major obstruction on which the entire film is predicated: we're never allowed to view Leth's original short from beginning to end, nor do we ever see the entirety of any of the five remakes – a structuring omission that celebrates the caprices of creation even as it iterates the all too familiar production frustrations every filmmaker must learn to endure.

Far from the emotionally battering melodramas for which von Trier is best known, The Five Obstructions turns the tables on the famously unforgiving filmmaker by forcing him to contend with a central character who refuses to be flattened by the iron fist of fate. Happy to either abide by or abandon each of von Trier's rules of the game, Leth – who claims among his own influences aesthetic strategists Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and John Cage – clearly delights in thinking two moves ahead of his codirector. Von Trier may have set out to reduce "The Perfect Human" to ruins, but Leth has other ideas: rather than ruining perfection by attempting to improve on it, he turns his own imperfections into advantages, and by smiling and cheating and looking so fine, finally manages to ruin his ruiner instead.

'The Five Obstructions' opens Fri/25, Lumiere Theatre, 1572 California, S.F. (415) 267-4893; Act I and II, 2128 Center, Berk. (510) 843-FILM. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times and prices.