It's been about two weeks since I saw Lars von Trier's latest, most controversial film (trailer and clip), and I have to admit I haven't made a lot of headway in wrapping my head around it or parsing its many elements. (Not to point any fingers *ahem* but it hasn't helped that I haven't had anyone else to discuss it with.) So don't expect too much in the way of full-fledged analysis or brilliant insights here; I'll be the first to admit that with this film, I'm pretty far in over my head. I may not have really understood Antichrist, but I was awestruck nevertheless.
The film begins—its "prologue" is so similar stylistically to the opening sequence of The Fall, with its breathtakingly beautiful black-and-white photography of initially seemingly disparate images, shot in glacial slow-motion and silent except for its classical score (in Antichrist's case, Handel's Lascia ch'io pianga), that von Trier might need to worry about a call from Tarsem's lawyers—with a couple (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) passionately making love, while their toddler son escapes from his crib, climbs out an open window, and falls to his death. Months later, he seems to have come to terms with it, while she's still tormented by guilt and grief. A therapist, he's distrustful of her doctors and the medications they prescribe her and takes her emotional recovery upon himself; meanwhile, their marriage becomes increasingly strained, with their child's death bringing latent dissatisfactions and resentments to the surface. Insisting that she face her fears head-on in order to overcome them, he takes her to the place she says she fears the most: Eden, their isolated, rustic cabin in the woods. Once there, he has her undergo several tests and exercises in hopes of getting to the bottom of her feelings of guilt toward their son, her increasingly unstable (almost bipolar) feelings toward him, and her powerful, seemingly irrational fear of nature. (As she tells him at one point, chillingly dispassionately, almost as a non-sequitur, "Nature is Satan's church.")
Watching Antichrist, I was alternatingly entranced and repulsed. The cinematography is stunningly beautiful, especially of the woods surrounding Eden. Dafoe and Gainsbourg both deliver fantastic performances, particularly Gainsbourg (winner of the best-actress award at Cannes this year), who's at times coldly calm or indifferent, as if in shock, and at others bestially, ferociously passionate, with emotion pouring out from the depths of her soul. Thematically there's so much going on that I don't really know where to begin: gender, power, sexuality, guilt, fear, loss, revenge, violence, life and death, rationality, history, man in nature, man against nature, nature against man, fantasy and reality, archetypes, modernity, health, psychology, just for starters off the top of my head. A library's worth could be written about this film. It also doesn't flinch from depicting graphic violence and sex—in some cases at the same time. At times it was terrifying, gruesome, and pretty difficult to watch; that isn't a criticism, but puts in alongside other great, very unpleasant films like Requiem for a Dream, United 93, Funny Games, and Come and See.
A lot of the controversy surrounding Antichrist comes from its perceived misogyny, but that seems to be a somewhat simplistic take. It's true that the film's concerned with the differences, real or perceived, between men and women, and that in many ways the husband acts in a traditionally masculine fashion—rational, in control, methodological—while the wife acts in a traditionally feminine fashion—hyper-emotional, even hysterical at times, without the ability (or perhaps desire) to cordon off and set aside her feelings. But it would be a mistake simply to read the film as saying, "When men grieve for a dead child they're all like this, but when women grieve for a dead child they're all like this" (said like a bad stand-up comic). The wife ends up doing some pretty atrocious things to her husband and herself by the end of the film, but I can't really say yet that von Trier intended those things to be a condemnation of her or of women in general. (That's what keeps it from being an art-house torture-porn version of The Room; both von Trier and Wiseau made their films from an intensely personal, emotional place, but somehow I don't think von Trier made Antichrist to get back at a girl who'd dumped him.) I can't say I have a definite, or even vague, answer at this point, but there's just too much going on simply to write it all off as a woman-hating screed.
Though I may never muster the courage to watch it again, knowing now what I'd be getting myself into, Antichrist is certainly one of the best films of the year, and among the most beautiful, most challenging, and most frustrating I think I've ever seen. I've heard it described as von Trier's take on the horror genre; toward that end, he was able to imbue it with an unspoken sense of threat and foreboding long before the fantastical, bizarre, and gruesome events toward the end. (For instance, there's a very Lynchian shot, at the end of the scene early on of the husband visiting his wife at the hospital, that centers on the seemingly empty space between them and very slowly zooms in on the vase of flowers on the table beside her bed until the screen is filled with the green, murky water in the vase, as the monotonic score hums boomingly; very, inexplicably unsettling. Lynch is a master of making the mundane creepy; if you're going to borrow, borrow from the best.) I haven't seen much of von Trier's filmography, just Dancer in the Dark (trailer), another unpleasant film about which I found things both to like and dislike. Having seen Antichrist, I may have to man up and see some of his other films (about which I've heard good things, but which are supposed to be similarly hard on the audience); whatever the have in store for me, at this point I can't say I wasn't warned.
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