A Page of Madness : Lars Von Trier’s ANTICHRIST : 6/10

Published on: May 26th, 2009

Of course, I borrow, for a moment, Hitchcock's camera and then place it in a landscape by Tarkovsky, but something happens in that process.
                   Lars von Trier, interview, 1990

At the Cannes Festival the papers said that Fellini's last film was a total disaster, and that he himself had ceased to exist. It's terrible, but it is true, his film is worthless.
                   Andrei Tarkovsky, diary, 1980

Don't believe the hype. Antichrist, while absolutely nobody's idea of a walk in the park – with its explicit scenes of copulation, genital mutilation and grisly assault - isn't half so hideously gruelling or shockingly intense as you'd guess from the febrile dispatches resulting from its Cannes world-premiere. 
   Rather, while this is a very confrontational, transgressive piece of cinema, it would be a mistake to reject it as mere extremity for extremity's sake. The assembled critics on the Cote d'Azur seemed to take particular umbrage at Von Trier's end-titles dedication of the film to Andrei Tarkovsky – and while Antichrist isn't up to the high standards of the Russian maestro's work, he would no doubt approve of Von Trier's brave and audacious channelling of ideas and images into cinematic forms that range from the jaggedly potent to the delicately transcendent.
   The most obvious visual debt to Tarkovsky is the remote woodland cabin (purportedly in Washington state, though the picture was shot in Germany) where much of the story unfolds – a building and location that are atmospherically reminiscent of the childhood dacha from Mirror (1974).*
   This remote spot is where a married couple, never named, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe, unwisely retreat following the accidental death of their young son Nic – who fell from the high window of their city-centre apartment while the pair were engaged in vigorous lovemaking (the copulation is shown in brief but explicit detail – featuring 'body double' work from Horst Stramka and a certain 'Mandy Starship') during the slow-motion monochrome prologue.)

   The wife is much more obviously traumatised than the husband – a psychotherapist who, contrary to the ethics of his profession, decides to take his spouse as his latest "patient." His remedy involves forcing her to confront her darkest fears, but this only serves to send her further into psychosis - and, ultimately, extreme violence. 
   The talky first hour, much of it an examination of marital discord, has a chamber-piece Bergmanesque feel, and Von Trier wouldn't be Von Trier without his occasional nod to his spiritual/creative "mentor" and countryman Dreyer: the wife's academic researches into witchcraft (and "gynocide") stir memories of Dreyer's foray into medieval superstition and repression, Day of Wrath.
   In terms of cinema, however, the principal reference-points are Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now (as indicated by Von Trier's choice of name for the deceased child) and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. As in the former, a determinedly rational man is forced, by circumstances beyond his control, to accept the power of the irrational - and ultimately, to take extreme actions because of it. But whereas the Donald Sutherland character in the Roeg movie genuinely does possess the "gift" of second sight, the male protagonist of Antichrist experiences what seem more like hallucinatory "fugue" states.
   During these spells – each of which is something of a tour-de-force for Von Trier's regular DoP, the recently Oscar-anointed Anthony Dod Mantle, Dafoe's character has dream-like encounters with a deer, a fox and a crow – that are presented (in terms of cinematography, music and editing [Anders Refn, reuniting with Von Trier for the first time since 1996's Breaking the Waves]) more as a manifestation of his own mental aberration than as evidence of the supernatural somehow "intruding" into the real world.
   In this manner, Von Trier tips us the wink that both his characters are, principally as a result of guilt and grief, suffering from extreme mental-health disorders. The grotesque extremities of the final act - in which both characters inflict dire "punishments" upon the other - should therefore be interpreted in the context of their mental imbalance, rather than being taken as signs that Von Trier himself somehow lost his mind during the writing and shooting of the film (the latter being the choice of many Cannes observers.)
   That said, Antichrist does support Von Trier's description of how its preparation and execution were intended as therapy to help him out of a deep depression. There's the definite feeling at key junctures that certain dark obsessions and neuroses are being worked through via the medium of cinema, though the idea that the movie could somehow operate as a catharsis for Von Trier is hampered by the fact that he's also making a belated segue into what is for him an entirely new genre (at least in terms of cinema – his TV series The Kingdom certainly has its horrific moments.)
   Many have remarked upon the presence of a "misogyny consultant" in the end credits – "research on misogyny" is the actual billing, alongside others "on music" and "on anxiety." But most telling of all is the presence of an individual responsible for "researcher into horror films." The horror genre is, however, much harder to pull off than it may appear from the outside – and Von Trier's awkward embrace of some of its more extreme tropes is reminiscent of what happened when Stanley Kubrick made The Shining.
   In both instances we have a "respectable" and clever-clever filmmaker dabbling in what he perhaps considers to be a debased and inferior form of cinematic storytelling. Neither Kubrick nor Von Trier comes across as comfortable with expressing themselves within the horror context, and too often the Dane relies on sub-David-Lynchian inserts involving glimpses of dark forests accompanied by nightmarish music susurrations.
   Antichrist might have worked as a "straight" horrror – or could have have been more satisfying and productive if it had concentrated on plumbing the darker recesses of Von Trier's own fears and insecurities. As it is, it tries to do both things – with decidedly compromised, uneven results (oddly under-exposed crazy comedy The Boss of It All remains his most satisfying feature since the Palme d'Or triumph for Dancer in the Dark) in the end, after experiencing such histrionics, all of this madness, we might well wonder what the point of it all was. 
   And whereas Lynch (who trained as a painter, thinks more visually than verbally, and isn't at all an intellectual) is sufficiently relaxed to be able to wallow in his own perversions and eccentricities, Von Trier's writerly, brainy, analytical side can't help but assert itself time and again. Then there's Dario Argento – whose recent Third Mother is, for all its incoherence and absurdity, a much more nightmarish journey into sexual mutilation and grotesquerie – a film-maker who consistently gives the impression that cinema functions as an emotional safety-valve, allowing him to "exorcise" his demons in public view. With Von Trier, there's more a sense – this time – that we're glimpsing into what appears to be a trounled psyche. As the saying goes, it's one thing to visit this place, quite another to have to live there.
   By the end of Antichrist, one may feel rather sorry for an individual who has, up till now, been largely content to hide behind the guise of prankster and japester, incapable of being taken seriously no matter how grave his ostensible subect-matter. Here, perhaps for the first time, it seems that Von Trier is being utterly and painfully sincere. And this makes that wildly vociferous critical reception (hooting, shrieking, booing, laughter) in Cannes all the more bizarre and dismaying. It does sound rather like an instance of mass hysteria (which is rather ironic, given the film's fixation on female dysfunction.) But if he's got any sense, Lars will surely never want to set foot on the Croisette ever again.
Neil Young
29th-31st May, 2009

ANTICHRIST : [6/10] : Denmark (/Ger/Fr/Swe/Ity/Pol) 2009 : Lars VON TRIER : 108m (timed) : seen 29th May, Dagmar Teatret cinema, Copenhagen : public show – paid 65kr (=  £7.63 approx)

more on Antichrist, for The Auteurs website : (NO) FEAR OF FLYING
second opinion from Sheila Seacroft

* Post-script : On reflection, I wonder if the whole of Antichrist isn't in some way an extended homage to the Pagan Holiday section of Andrei Rublev:

20 minutes quite unlike anything else in Rublev, or, indeed, in any other film, as the painter stumbles across a subfusc pagan ceremony. Distant, sharp violins fill the soundtrack, naked pagans run out of the forest, Rublev is tempted by a lusty wench, mist swirls and flames flare among the dark trees, sacrificial candle-lit boats float out over a black river, the pagans are hunted down and forced to swim for their lives as an impassive Rublev sails silently by.   'Pagan Holiday' is a magnificent, hallucinatory glimpse of  'the other side.'

“>