Lars von Trier is breaking up. Partly, it's because our transatlantic connection is on the fritz, but even when he's coming through loud and clear, Trier has trouble explaining the connection between The Story of O and his new movie, Manderlay, opening next week. It's clear that Pauline Réage's landmark novel of erotic submission has long appealed to Trier (the "von" is an affectation), providing the subject for one of his first student shorts. But when he's asked to explain its enduring fascination, Trier audibly fumbles for a response. "When you're a young man, a searching young man, you go through different kinds of stuff, and this was one of the milestones in erotic literature. I don't know how to put it, but I would say that sexuality, as we all know, is a very powerful force on our states, you know, our statements." He trails off, or maybe is swallowed by a burst of silent static.

Trier's unease is itself unsettling, given that his public pronouncements often have the ring of well-honed provocations. But it's somehow fitting that, rather than fire off a pre-packaged statement about the link between Story of O—or, more specifically, Jean Paulhan's prologue, "Happiness in Slavery"—and Manderlay's story of an Alabama plantation where slavery still rules 70 years after emancipation, Trier goes for the most personal, and awkward, explanation. "I'm maybe trying to tell you that I was as a young man, and still am, interested in sex, and I was trying to investigate different forms of this."

GIVE ME LIBERTY: Lars von Trier on the Manderlay set.

Our phone call rejoined and Trier's proclivities out of the way, he takes on a more familiar charge: that he is one of the film world's most virulent anti-Americans. Trier has often seemed to court the charge, especially of late, given that Manderlay is, following Dogville, his second overt attack on the country. (One wonders if that phone-line crackle was Alberto Gonzales listening in.) But Trier downplays his inflammatory past statements, hedging on the idea that, in her attempt to deliver freedom to Manderlay's slaves at the barrel of a machine gun, Bryce Dallas Howard's Grace is representative of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. "It's not a very easy question," Trier says, "but the one thing I can say for sure is that the film was written before the war. So in the script, it has nothing to do with Iraq."

Scripts, of course, are not films, and there are moments in Manderlay when the Iraq resonance is overwhelming. But the movie has a larger, and more coherent, affinity with Trier's body of work, particularly in its suggestion that removing all restrictions is not the same as freedom. Trier first gained international notoriety as the author of the Dogme95 Manifesto, an anti-aesthetic 10 Commandments predicated on stripping away stylistic crutches like tripods, musical score and "superficial action." Dogme's effect on its other signatories was decidedly mixed, but for Trier it was a revelation, a swift break with the inert, encrusted movies that preceded it. By restricting himself, Trier set himself free.

"Restrictions is a basic thing for an artist," Trier says. "When you paint a painting, the first thing that you have to do is cut out a square of reality. I believe that within that square, you have much more freedom, because the only thing you have to worry about is this little square you have chosen to work with." To those familiar with Trier's approach, and his generally pessimistic view of human nature, it will come as no surprise that Manderlay's slaves, once liberated by the self-righteous Grace—and deprived of their own code of law, named for the plantation's late owner—quickly find themselves at each other's throats.

In addressing the legacy of slavery, Trier finds himself on particularly dangerous ground, especially as a man whose fear of flying has prevented him ever visiting the U.S. In Manderlay's press kit, Trier says that most black actors refused to meet for the movie after reading the script, although he admits on the phone that any objections were conveyed by his casting director. "Maybe I'm not the one to ask," he says, "but as I heard it, it was that the political intention of the movie was not clear enough—which I believe is right." Apart from the "propagandistic" end credits, a photographic litany of lynchings and race riots scored to David Bowie's "Young Americans," Trier says, "It's not crystal clear what the film is saying. I understand that people thought that was a problem. But on the other hand, most of the people we talked to said it was a good thing that we discussed the subject, but they were not sure they wanted to be in it." As it is, Manderlay's black cast is made up mostly of European actors, with the exception of Danny Glover, who plays the plantation's overseer. Glover has, without apparent malice, described the movie as a "white man's view" of slavery.

Trier says Europeans are so steeped in American culture that it's no stretch to make a movie set there, even if it is shot entirely in a Danish studio. At the same time, though, Trier doesn't want Manderlay to be seen as a movie focused solely on the U.S. "I don't believe there's any difference, if you're American or whatever you are," he says. As a youth, when he was active in the Danish Communist party, Trier says he had "no doubt that America, or the government of America, was responsible for a lot of bad things happening in the world." Now, he believes that is "not only the truth, but maybe also the truth."

Manderlay opens Fri., Feb. 17, at Ritz Theaters.