On a High Note, Kidman Says It's Time to Quit

Nicole Kidman is planning to quit acting after giving the performance of her life in Lars von Trier's Dogville, yesterday pronounced a masterpiece by many at the Cannes film festival.

The manner in which the most sought after leading lady in the world said she wanted "another life" was as elegiac and surprising as the film, set in a dying US mining township during the Depression. Having asked for a cigarette from co-star Stellan Skarsgard, Kidman said she wanted to "fall in love and then ... just slowly dwindle away".

"This life is a burn-out life, you give so much of yourself that ultimately I am going to have to step away from it," the Australian-born Oscar winner, 35, told an extraordinary press conference. "This can't be what I am going to do for ever and ever. So I look at it as something that will finish in its own time - I won't suddenly quit, it will just slowly dwindle away."

But it is the maverick Danish director's comments on the soul of America, which led yesterday to one US critic accusing him to his face of "Taliban thinking", as much as Kidman's statement of intent which will make headlines on the other side of the Atlantic.

Dogville is the first of a trilogy of apparently damning parables of how the nation's founding ideals have been corrupted, called U, S and A.

Although von Trier, who has never visited the States, at first denied attacking America, US critics thought otherwise.

The director later seemed to confirm that impression. "I feel like an American. Ich bin ein American. I would love to start a Free America campaign because we have just had a Free Iraq campaign. You could say I'm a Communist, but I'm not. I want to free America because, from over here, I see a lot of shit in America. Maybe [this idea] comes to me from journalists who are lying. I'm just a mirror.

"I am sure it is a beautiful country. I would love to go there, but I am afraid to go. It could be a wonderful place, but I can't go there right now because America is not how it should be. If you don't like what I'm saying, I'm sorry, you can just forget it."

Despite their qualms, American critics were united in predicting Dogville would win von Trier the Palme d'Or for the second time for successive films, a feat not even Fellini, Bunuel or Coppola managed.

Desson Howe of the Washington Post said: " I don't buy all this reflex anti-Americanism, and I am not sure that is what it is about. But it is a work of art." John Anderson of New York's Newsday said his compatriots were in no mood to listen to this morality tale of a threatened community that turns on an outsider and enslaves her. "It is a work of genius. My question is, will anyone in the US go to see it?

"Despite what von Trier says, it is a total indictment of American global culture. From use of the Thornton Wilder stage setting, to the Tom Sawyer references, to the High Noon finish, it is anti what has happened to America. I not arguing with what he says, but it is."

One dissenting voice was Gerald Peary of the Boston Phoenix, who raised the spectre of the Taliban, and excoriated von Trier for his treatment of woman characters. "Since Breaking the Waves you have made three movies where in the last act your actresses are either tortured, killed, raped, or humiliated. Why do you do this to women?"

"Because," replied von Trier, "I don't think it's that exciting when men are tortured. But that's a personal thing.

"I've always been the victim. I see these women as strong characters: the little female within myself that I dream is there but maybe is not."

Kidman has divorced her Scientologist husband, Tom Cruise. She confessed she was "raw" inside when she turned up at a bare studio in Sweden to work with von Trier (who has a reputation for reducing actresses to quivering wrecks) on a sound stage without sets.

The singer Bjork stormed out in making von Trier's previous Palme d'Or winner Dancer in the Dark, and the British actress Emily Watson was also put through the wringer on Breaking the Waves. Kidman, too, clashed with him. "The first week was tricky," she confessed, but a three-hour walk in the woods cleared the air.

"Lars had preconceptions about me, and I probably did about him. It was a difficult few hours. It was warts and all, tears and screaming ... I had a pretty strong reaction about being chained to that iron wheel ... It was either going to work, or it wasn't. But I trusted him. I don't know why, but I did," she joked.

Yesterday she confirmed she would play the character in the other two parts of the trilogy, Manderay and Alabama, which is dedicated to British actress Katrin Cartlidge, who starred in Breaking the Waves, and died suddenly last year.

"I know I probably won't do this for the rest of my life. There are other things that interest me. When I fall in love, that's when I will stop doing so much of this, because I'll settle down. I went through a period in my life when I wasn't able to move around and explore much, so now I am kind of living that out."

However, she is soon to star in a remake of The Stepford Wives: "I want to do something light now."