Lars von Trier's 'Antichrist'

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Lars von Trier's 'Antichrist'

Postby Jeff » Sun May 17, 2009 10:51 pm

I was going to post this in the Lounge, but I think von Trier is always GD-worthy, and the subject matter of this film doesn't sound especially loungy. (Besides, "nature is Satan's church" makes an appealing party topic, and who's tired yet of debating the virtue of transgression in art?)

trailer 1 and trailer 2

It just screened at Cannes, to strong reaction. (Disturbing spoilers follow.)

Roger Ebert:

There's electricity in the air. Every seat is filled, even the little fold-down seats at the end of every row. It is the first screening of Lars von Trier's "Antichrist," and we are ready for anything. We'd better be. Von Trier's film goes beyond malevolence into the monstrous. Never before have a man and woman inflicted more pain upon each other in a movie. We looked in disbelief. There were piteous groans. Sometimes a voice would cry out, "No!" At certain moments there was nervous laughter. When it was all over, we staggered up the aisles. Manohla Dargis, the merry film critic of The New York Times, could be heard singing "That's Entertainment!"

Whether this is a bad, good or great film is entirely beside the point. It is an audacious spit in the eye of society. It says we harbor an undreamed-of capacity for evil. It transforms a psychological treatment into torture undreamed of in the dungeons of history. Torturers might have been capable of such actions, but they would have lacked the imagination. Von Trier is not so much making a film about violence as making a film to inflict violence upon us, perhaps as a salutary experience. It's been reported that he suffered from depression during and after the film. You can tell. This is the most despairing film I've ever have seen.

If, as they say, you are not prepared for "disturbing images," I advise you to just just stop reading now.

The film involves a couple, He and She, whose infant child falls out a window and smashes to the pavement while they are making explicit love. They feel devastating grief. He, a psychologist, takes She off psychotropic medications, and they go to live in their secluded hideaway in the forest, a cottage named Eden.

He subjects her to probing questions and the discussion of the Meaning of it All, which must affect her like a needle to an inflamed tooth. Oh, He is quite intelligent and insightful, and brings passive aggression to a brutally intimate level. Then she wounds him, and while he's unconscious she used a large woodscrew to drill a hole through his leg and bolt a grindstone to it. He drags himself into the forest and tries to hide in an animal burrow. She finds him, and pounds him with a shovel to force him deeper. Then she tries to bury him alive.

What does this metaphor (with a Prologue, an Epilogue and Four Chapters) mean? The dinner conversations all over town must not have been appetizing. Some read it this way: Perhaps the world began with man evil instead of good, guilty instead of innocent. That the Garden of Eden was visited by the Antichrist, not the Lord. That man's Original Sin was not eating from the Tree of Knowledge, but not vomiting forth knowledge and purging himself.

All for this will be discussed at great length. What can be said is that von Trier, after what many found the agonizing boredom of his previous Cannes films "Dogville" and "Manderlay," has made a film that is not boring. Unendurable, perhaps, but not boring. For relief I am looking forward to the overnight reviews of those who think they can explain exactly what it means. In this case, perhaps, a film should not mean, but be.

Reuters:

CANNES, France (Reuters) - Danish director Lars von Trier elicited derisive laughter, gasps of disbelief, a smattering of applause and loud boos on Sunday as the credits rolled on his drama "Antichrist" at the Cannes film festival.

The film, starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as a couple seeking to overcome the grief of losing their only child, has quickly become the most talked-about at this year's festival, which ends on May 24.

Cannes' notoriously picky critics and press often react audibly to films during screenings, but Sunday evening's viewing was unusually demonstrative.

Jeers and laughter broke out during scenes ranging from a talking fox to graphically-portrayed sexual mutilation.

...

In production notes for Antichrist, the 53-year-old director said that the movie was a "kind of therapy" for depression he was suffering from two years ago.

"I can offer no excuse for 'Antichrist' ... other than my absolute belief in the film -- the most important film of my entire career!"


The Daily Mail:

Another scene that had some writhing in extreme discomfort called for a heavy object to crush Dafoe's nether regions. The next moment Gainsbourge performs a sexual act on Dafoe which is too explicit to full describe.

However, after the screening it was explained that the male member displayed did not belong top the famously well-endowed actor.

"The penis was that of a German porn actor called Horst and the hand seen in that scene didn't belong to Miss Gainsbourg, it was the hand of a German porn actress", a spokeswoman for the film explained, helpfully.

The scene mentioned above will surely have trouble getting past the British film censors. And certainly a sequence where Gainsbourg's character uses a pair of scissors to mutilate herself will also most likely be well clipped.

One moment that will remain intact, for it provided a rare moment of humour, when a Basil Brush-type speaking fox utters the line "chaos reigns'.

This is a symbol of how nature influences our nightmares. It will take a team of psychologists to examine the film for its deeper meanings rather than film writers.
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Postby justdrew » Sun May 17, 2009 11:08 pm

hmmm, I just watched Mario Bava's film of the same name. Thanks goodness coincidence and synchronicity mean nothing. nothing I say... :lol: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071150

doesn't Hopsicker and/or Emory talk about a Lars von Trier ?
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Postby RocketMan » Mon May 18, 2009 8:31 am

I liked Breaking the Waves, haven't seen Riget (which I really should see, I know), haven't seen Dancer in the Dark but find Dogville awkward, didactic and too on the nose. The man also seems like a somewhat sadistic, malevolent misanthrope/misogynist. But what do I know. :)

This film sounds like a trip... But I never was one for such gory violence or genital mutilation. That may be one of the reasons I haven't yet watched Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher. :scaredhide:
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Postby Jeff » Mon May 18, 2009 9:07 am

RocketMan wrote:The man also seems like a somewhat sadistic, malevolent misanthrope/misogynist. But what do I know. :)


Well, I'd say you know Lars von Trier.

A lot of reaction to Antichrist seems to be I can't decide whether I love it or hate it. Riget excepted, I've felt that towards everything of his I've seen. I still feel that way about Breaking the Waves.


Xan Brooks in the Guardian:

"Chaos reigns," declares a mangy fox about midway through Lars von Trier's Antichrist. The audience guffaws and then – whoops – we are pitched headlong into the abyss. Until then I'd been standing toe-to-toe with the film, which casts Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe as a bereaved couple going off the rails at their shack in the woods. But after that I'm senseless; my thoughts in tatters. There are squawking crows and pitch-black holes and an abattoir's worth of mutilation that I could only peer at through splayed fingers.

Chaos reigns. I stumble out in a daze, momentarily unsure whether I loved it or loathed it. Abruptly I realise that I love it. Von Trier has slapped Cannes with an astonishing, extraordinary picture – shocking and comical; a funhouse of terrors (of primal nature, of female sexuality) that rattles the bones and fizzes the blood before bowing out with a presumptuous dedication to Andrei Tarkovsky that had sections of the crowd hooting in fury. If he had dedicated Antichrist to the Queen Mother he could not have insulted them more.

Outside I run into Geoff Andrew, head of film programming at the BFI Southbank. He informs me that the mangy fox was apparently voiced by the ex-husband of Amy Taubin, film critic on the Village Voice. Christ alive. Imagine sitting through a film like that, struggling to hang on to your mental moorings, only to have your ex-husband show up in the guise of vermin to tell you that chaos reigns. They'd have had to carry me out in a straitjacket.

...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/may ... -von-trier
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Postby 8bitagent » Tue May 19, 2009 4:55 am

All I know, is that European filmmakers make extremely shocking, uncompromising and soul shattering dramas that no American filmmaker could approach.

Anyone seen Irreversible? My God that is the most disturbing film Ive ever seen.

Michael Haneke is another filmmaker who makes pretty shocking cinema.
Its interesting how these filmmakers drama type films are actually much more shocking and scary than American horror films.

And Breaking the Waves, is that one about the oil rig women beaten and raped? Man that was depressing.
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Postby orz » Tue May 19, 2009 5:38 am

If he had dedicated Antichrist to the Queen Mother he could not have insulted them more.

Haha amazing.

RI people might be interested in his very very odd horror/comedy/hospital drama TV series The Kingdom, not to be confused by Steven King's lame american remake.
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Postby compared2what? » Tue May 19, 2009 6:01 am

8bitagent wrote:All I know, is that European filmmakers make extremely shocking, uncompromising and soul shattering dramas that no American filmmaker could approach.


May you stay forever young.
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Postby Jeff » Tue May 19, 2009 1:13 pm

I don't even know if I could sit through it - I'd like to think I could, and I couldn't - but this film has had more of an impact on me unseen than most of those I have seen, even favourites. The night of the day I read the first bulletins from Cannes I dreamt I was in a sterile mall being inundated by a tsunami, which is to say my unconscious just awarded von Trier the Grand Prize.

Ebert's shit is still being stirred:


Lars von Trier's new film will not leave me alone. A day after many members of the audience recoiled at its first Cannes showing, "Antichrist" is brewing a scandal here; I am reminded of the tumult following the 1976 premiere of Oshima's "In the Realm of the Senses" and its castration scene. I said I was looking forward to von Trier's overnight reviews, and I haven't been disappointed. Those who thought it was good thought it was very very good ("Something completely bizarre, massively uncommercial and strangely perfect"--Damon Wise, Empire) and those who thought it was bad found it horrid ("Lars von Trier cuts a big fat art-film fart with "Antichrist"--Todd McCarthy, Variety).

I rarely find a serious film by a major director to be this disturbing. Its images are a fork in the eye. Its cruelty is unrelenting. Its despair is profound. Von Trier has a way of affecting his viewers like that. After his "Breaking the Waves" premiered at Cannes in 1996, Georgia Brown of the Village Voice fled to the rest room in emotional turmoil and Janet Maslin of the New York Times followed to comfort her. After this one, Richard and Mary Corliss blogged at Time.com that "Antichrist" presented the spectacle of a director going mad.

...

A reader signing himself Scott D posted this comment after my first entry on the film: "If it is in fact the most despairing film you've ever seen, shouldn't it be considered a monumental achievement? Despair is such a significant aspect of the human condition (particularly in the modern western world) so how can this not be a staggeringly important film, given your statement?" There is truth to what Scott D says. In the first place, it's important to note that "Antichrist" is not a bad film. It is a powerfully-made film that contains material many audiences will find repulsive or unbearable. The performances by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg are heroic and fearless. Von Trier's visual command is striking. The use of music is evocative; no score, but operatic and liturgical arias. And if you can think beyond what he shows to what he implies, its depth are frightening.

I cannot dismiss this film. It is a real film. It will remain in my mind. Von Trier has reached me and shaken me. It is up to me to decide what that means. I think the film has something to do with religious feeling. It is obvious to anyone who saw "Breaking the Waves" that von Trier's sense of spirituality is intense, and that he can envision the supernatural as literally present in the world. His reference is Catholicism. Raised by a communist mother and a socialist father in a restrictive environment, he was told as an adult that his father was not his natural parent, and renounced that man's Judaism to convert, at the age of 30, to the Catholic church. It was at about the same age that von Trier founded the Dogma movement, with its monkish asceticism.

If you have to ask what a film symbolizes, it doesn't. With this one, I didn't have to ask. It told me. I believe "Antichrist" may be an exercise in alternative theology: von Trier's version of those passages in Genesis where Man is cast from Eden and Satan assumes a role in the world.

The Prologue, a masterful sequence lovely b&w slow motion, shows a couple, He and She, making love while their innocent baby becomes fascinated by the sight of snow falling outside an open window, climbs up on the sill, and falls to his death. This is Man's Fall from Grace. Consequently, She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) falls into guilt and depression so deep she is hospitalized. That is one half of Original Sin. The character named He (Willem Dafoe) insists she cut off her medication. He will cure her himself. That is the other half. Her sin is Despair. His is Pride. These are the two greatest sins against God.

He and She go to their country home, named Eden. He subjects her to merciless talk therapy, relentlessly chipping away at her rationalizations and defenses, explaining to her why she is wrong to feel the way she does. I suspect many of the reviews will focus on the physical violence She inflicts upon He in the next act of the film. It is important to note that the earlier psychological violence He inflicts is equally brutal. He talks and talks, boring away at her defenses, tearing at her psyche, exposing her. Listen to Dafoe's voice in the trailer linked below. It could be used for Satan's temptation of Christ in the desert.

There is little sense at Eden of real lives together; He and She they are locked in combat that seems their inescapable destiny after the loss of their child. The violence in the film is explicit, but is it intended to be realistic? I don't believe you can have a hole drilled clean through your leg, an iron bar pushed through it, and a grindstone bolted to it, and do much other than be in agony. That He can even speak, let alone crawl into the woods, contend with her and defend himself, is remarkable. I think the violence illustrates the depth of her venom and that She, like He, will stop at nothing.

Images suggesting Bosch are evoked toward the end of the film. Human limbs rise up to grasp He and She as they have sex. There is a talking dog, bluebirds, a deer, inhabiting the world of Man. At the end He stands atop a hill while a legion of unnatural humans ascends toward him, evoking "Night of the Living Dead." The suggestion is Biblical, but not from the Bible we know. The human figures are not naked, climbing toward birth, but clothed, climbing toward death. After their fall in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve learned shame, and covered their nakedness. In this evil world, they are created covered, and by their sins are cast out into nakedness.

Von Trier's original intention, it's said, was to reveal at the end that the world was created by Satan, not God: That evil, not goodness, reigns ascendant. His finished film reflects the same idea, but not as explicitly. The title "Antichrist" is the key. This is a mirror world. It is a sin to lose Knowledge rather than to eat of its fruit and gain it. She and He are behaving with such cruelty toward each other not as actual people, but as creatures inhabiting a moral mirror world. As much as they might comfort and love each other in our world after losing a child, so to the same degree in the mirror world they inflame each other's pain and act out hatred. This would be the world created by Satan.

If I am right, then von Trier has proceeded with perfect logic. Just as a good world could not contain too much beauty and charity, an evil world could not have too much cruelty and hatred. He is making a moral statement. I'm not sure if he's telling us how things are, or warning us of what could come. But I am sure he has not compromised his vision. He has been brave and strong, and made a film that fully reflects the pain of his own feelings. And his actors have been remarkably courageous in going all the way with him.

In his own defense here at Cannes, von Trier has described himself "the greatest director in the world." Well, if Le Film Francais says he is merde, what can he be expected to say? He is certainly one of the most heroic directors in the world, uncompromising, resolute. He goes all the way and takes no prisoners. Do I believe his film "works?" Would I "recommend" it? Is it a "good" film? I believe von Trier doesn't care how I or anyone else would reply to those questions. He had the ideas and feelings, he saw into the pit, he made the film, and here it is.
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Postby sunny » Tue May 19, 2009 2:29 pm

Jeff wrote:I don't even know if I could sit through it - I'd like to think I could, and I couldn't - but this film has had more of an impact on me unseen than most of those I have seen, even favourites.


I feel exactly the same way! :shock:

I love it when Ebert gets all het up about a film. He always had a much more everyman, emotional response to films, much moreso than Siskel, who took a more intellectual, analytical approach to criticism.
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Postby vigilant » Tue May 19, 2009 3:45 pm

Then she wounds him, and while he's unconscious she used a large woodscrew to drill a hole through his leg and bolt a grindstone to it. He drags himself into the forest and tries to hide in an animal burrow. She finds him, and pounds him with a shovel to force him deeper. Then she tries to bury him alive.


I'm pretty sure I was married to her doppleganger...
The whole world is a stage...will somebody turn the lights on please?....I have to go bang my head against the wall for a while and assimilate....
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Postby Perelandra » Tue May 19, 2009 4:53 pm

Jeff wrote:I don't even know if I could sit through it -

those who thought it was bad found it horrid ("Lars von Trier cuts a big fat art-film fart with "Antichrist"--Todd McCarthy, Variety).
I'm quite sure I couldn't.

The other day I thought maybe it's the "Anti-Breaking the Waves", in a sense. Then reading this quote made me laugh remembering a fairly sophisticated friend's remark after a group of us viewed it (the only one of his films I've seen), "it should be called "Breaking the Wind".
“The past is never dead. It's not even past.” - William Faulkner
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Postby justdrew » Tue May 19, 2009 5:30 pm

E fango è il mondo...

the Passion of the Antichrist ?

It sounds like it seems to resonate with Samuel Beckett's "How It Is"
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Postby Perelandra » Tue May 19, 2009 10:53 pm

edit
“The past is never dead. It's not even past.” - William Faulkner
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Postby ninakat » Tue May 19, 2009 11:15 pm

Ebert wrote:Von Trier is not so much making a film about violence as making a film to inflict violence upon us, perhaps as a salutary experience. It's been reported that he suffered from depression during and after the film. You can tell. This is the most despairing film I've ever have seen.

If, as they say, you are not prepared for "disturbing images," I advise you to just just stop reading now.


OK, I took Ebert's advice. If his words are that disturbing, why should I indulge Von Trier's ultra-dark imagination? Because it's art, right?

Ebert must have been shaken because there are two glaring typos in the above snippet ("I've ever have seen" and "just just stop reading"). He's probably just tired.... or possessed.
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Postby lightningBugout » Wed May 20, 2009 12:00 am

Iraqi boys are being sodomized by American soldiers to coerce their fathers to give information that will allow an invading country to successfully overtake their native country in a war that is unjust in almost every sense of the word, that was built on lies and has been justified by corrupt elitists who use religious dogma to manipulate those same perpetrating soldiers who are probably there in large part in the first place because their home country is built on social violence having left them without privilege and with limited opportunity and in the process 100s of 1000s of people have died.

I should be able to hang with that over my espresso every morning.

But a movie like this might be hard to watch.

Ok.
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