542 Antichrist

[aox]

Guide for the Squeamish

I can't imagine anyone with any interest in this film not knowing about the controversial scenes, but alas, the guide I posted does have spoilers.

[Tribe]

AO Scott does not like Antichrist:

October 23, 2009
In Satan’s Church, an Eden Besieged

By A. O. SCOTT
Published: October 23, 2009

Women: intrinsically evil or tragically misunderstood? If this strikes you as a fruitful topic of discussion, then you may wish to see — or perhaps I should say endure — Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist,” a film that has already set off carefully orchestrated frissons of disturbance at film festivals around the world. It starts with a slow-motion, black-and-white sequence, scored to a Handel aria, of graphic sex (with a snippet of hard core thrown in just for fun) and climaxes with two vivid scenes of genital mutilation.

Mr. von Trier has said that making the movie helped him overcome a crippling depression. I’m glad he feels better. He has certainly lost none of the impish, assaultive sensationalism that has made him both a darling and a scapegoat of film critics. But the formal rigor and intellectual brio that made his best films — “Breaking the Waves” and “Dogville” — as hard to dismiss as they were easy to loathe seems to have abandoned him. The scandal of “Antichrist” is not that it is grisly or upsetting but that it is so ponderous, so conceptually thin and so dull.

The story is simple enough, and arises from a precipitating calamity laid out on the very first page of “Melodrama for Dummies”: the death of a child. During the sexual ecstasy of the opening scene, as a nameless couple played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg grapple on nearly every piece of furniture and appliance in their apartment, their son, a toddler, climbs from his crib and makes his way to an open window. He tumbles out, along with his teddy bear, at what seems to be precisely the moment of his mother’s orgasm.

The rest of “Antichrist,” divided into chapters and shot in weird, pulsating, muted digital color by Anthony Dod Mantle (“Slumdog Millionaire”), explores the aftermath of this fatal incident, and expands on its implicit linking of female sexuality and death. The mother is mad with grief and guilt, and Ms. Gainsbourg’s anguished, naked (literally and otherwise) performance is, at least in the film’s first half, its only genuinely harrowing aspect. Following in the footsteps of Emily Watson in “Breaking the Waves,” Bjork in “Dancer in the Dark” and Nicole Kidman in “Dogville,” she allows herself to be pushed and provoked toward brave and extraordinary feats of acting in a dubious cause.

Mr. Dafoe, playing her husband, is less demonstrative. A psychologist of some kind, he decides to take over his wife’s treatment, weaning her off medication and subjecting her to his own methodology, which includes drawing a triangle on a piece of paper. The apex represents the thing she fears most. Is it her husband? Is it nature? Is it the isolated forest cabin they call Eden?

That sinister, sylvan place is where they go to work things out, amid a storm of falling acorns and a riot of metaphors and curious optical effects. “Antichrist” certainly looks and sounds troubling, with landscapes that warp, buckle and undulate and an aural design that turns puffs of wind into satanic murmurs. Occasionally a grotesque animatronic animal — including a talking fox that has already gathered a cult following in cinephile circles — shows up to add an extra touch of Guignol.

Ms. Gainsbourg’s character calls nature “Satan’s church,” one of the film’s many nods in the direction of the horror genre. Another is her research into the history of witchcraft, in particular the murderous suppression of pagan religious practices associated with women in early modern Europe. The fruit of her work is a scrapbook of old woodcuts and paintings titled “Gynocide,” which her husband discovers in Eden’s attic.

Such pseudo-scholarship is of course a hallmark of the modern horror movie, though usually (as in “Paranormal Activity”) it is conducted via Internet search. Mr. Von Trier is in some ways a traditionalist, though his depictions of bodily harm inflicted by homely instruments (pliers, scissors, a fireplace log) are avant-garde enough to startle devotees of the “Saw” franchise. Unlike the makers of that persistently popular festival of pain, he is also a bit of a snob, a filmmaker who undermines his pulpy instincts with high-flown, vaguely political ideas.

The problem is that they are often dumb ideas. There has already been some debate among critics about whether “Antichrist” is grossly misogynistic or slyly feminist, an argument ultimately as fruitless as the question posed by the movie about the nature of women (see above). That talking fox has given the movie a handy catchphrase — “Chaos reigns!” — but a more apt one is delivered by Ms. Gainsbourg among bouts of howling, sobbing and penis smashing: “None of this is any use at all.”

[Nothing]

Ah yes, Mr. Scott is oh so superior to Mr. Trier.

[tavernier]

Armond calls it "Anticinema"

[knives]

An angel has got wings, congrats Armond.

[Tommaso]

She tells He: “Dreams are of no interest in modern psychology. Freud is dead, right?”This removes the possibility of symbolism and metaphor.

I wonder whether I should laugh or cry about White seemingly reading these words completely at face value and as a statement about the film as a whole.

[knives]

Especially since She is wrong.

[jbeall]

Don't know when I'll get the chance to see the film, but I have the sense that A.O. Scott gave Antichrist about as fair a review as it's likely to get. While Scott thinks that von Trier's earlier films had "formal rigor and intellectual brio," I've always thought he was just shocking for shocking's sake. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt until I actually see Antichrist, but his past record gives me little reason to hope this'll be anything more than shock porn with an avant-garde veneer. (I suppose the other way around would be preferable.)

[Nothing]

A.O.Scott willfully fails to engage with the film on any meaningful level, his review is the stuff of the playground.

[MichaelB]

A.O.Scott willfully fails to engage with the film on any meaningful level, his review is the stuff of the playground

How about Armond? You're a fan normally, aren't you?

[Nothing]

Armond amused me with this line:

making nonsense as busily, relentlessly and nihilistically as our own Steven Soderbergh

...and is therefore forgiven.

[domino harvey]

I'll say more later, but I doubt I will see a more unforgettable film this year. A total sensory experience, Antichrist is the closest I've ever come to a nightmare ("I agree," my friend quipped after the screening, but not as a compliment). Don't just queue this up at home with On Demand, get thee to a theatre. What Von Trier's film does with sound design is astonishing and come on, seeing that last third with an audience is something you'll remember for the rest of your days. At the IFC theatre in NYC, they're selling shirts proclaiming that you made it through the screening =D>

[royalton]

I don't know. I've seen nightmarish films before, and while it was certainly intense Antichrist didn't hit me the same way others have. I felt it was the least of his work, most of which I love, and I left mostly indifferent and a little amused - I felt punked, like the pervasive madness was all an elaborate put-on. Given the background of the shoot I imagine it wasn't, at least not entirely, but it still often came off as a lavish prank. I thought vT was trying on a new mask to scandalize the Cannes audience. Beautifully put together, great idea, I just thought it wasn't anything I hadn't seen before in better horror.

Of course, in the ensuing hours since, I can't stop puzzling it out despite my distinct lack of satisfaction. It underwhelmed me and I felt it was highly derivative, yet I have to see it again, if that makes any sense. So I suppose that must count for some success. I'll see how I feel about it after another viewing.

[Tribe]

I'll say more later, but I doubt I will see a more unforgettable film this year. A total sensory experience, Antichrist is the closest I've ever come to a nightmare ("I agree," my friend quipped after the screening, but not as a compliment). Don't just queue this up at home with On Demand, get thee to a theatre. What Von Trier's film does with sound design is astonishing and come on, seeing that last third with an audience is something you'll remember for the rest of your days. At the IFC theatre in NYC, they're selling shirts proclaiming that you made it through the screening =D>

I finally saw this On Demand yesterday (little chance of it playing on a screen even remotely near me...unless it's the Detroit area and that's a whole other list of contingencies). I agree the sensory aspect of it all much makes up for an otherwise unsatisfying couple of hours. The sound and visuals are indeed something to behold, but without those this would have easily been Von Trier's least substantial movie, imho. What does anyone make of the ending

Spoiler

what with the imagery of hundreds of women climbing the hill? Victims of past witch hunts, perhaps?

[Lemmy Caution]

Two observations:

Spoiler

1. A role reversal occurs when the Woman becomes dominant and aggressive and handy with tools -- and physically abuses the Male. At that point, not only women bleed, as the man now spurts blood out of his genitals.

2. At the start of the film, the (possible) conception of the second child kills the first-born, which I took as a rather von Triery symbolic/compressed take on Cain and Abel.

[Tommaso]

Interesting observations, Lemmy, I wouldn't have thought about your second point, but it makes sense. I couldn't make real sense of the ending, but Tribe's suggestion sounds pretty convincing. That's the good thing about this film: whether it's von Trier's least substantial movie or not, it fabulously works as a generator of thoughts, as a catalyst for making you think about the concepts it may or may not expose. Perhaps it's even this perceived insubstantiality that is necessary for the film to make it work that way.

Beautifully put together, great idea, I just thought it wasn't anything I hadn't seen before in better horror.

And that raises the question of genre, of course. Is it a horror film, or intended as such? I certainly don't think so (and that's one reason why I still think that the graphic violence is unnecessary to bring across the ideas of the film). The more I think about "Antichrist", the more I sense a closeness to a film like Pasolini's "Teorema"; it's wildly different of course, but what the two films share is that they are more or less illustrations of heady philosophical/spiritual ideas, and that they follow the consequences of these ideas to the end. "Antichrist" is less rigorous, more open to interpretation, of course. But I have to agree with Domino: it's probably an unforgettable experience; it's perhaps six weeks or so since I saw it, and it still sticks in my head with pretty much the same intensity as one day after watching it. That alone should be an indication that it probably cannot be totally bad.

[Peacock]

What were everyone's thoughts on the handheld camera? I presume it was to create a more nervous experience, but I wasn't wholly convinced, some of the long still shots looking at the cabin were just way too distractingly shaky.

This was my first Von Trier, and i'm looking forward to seeing more, even if the film was perhaps a little too open for interpretation.

I didn't realize till afterwards that it was shot entirely on digital (Phantom for the slo mo, RED for the rest), it really looked completely like film. I eagerly await the day RED Scarlet comes out now!

[Lemmy Caution]

The Cain and Abel reading (more or less) follows if you realize that they go to Eden, so they represent Adam and Eve, and therefore their children should be Cain and Abel. Fratricide occurs, symbolically, as the conception of a second child kills the first.

Of course, the order is wrong as Cain the 1st born killed his younger brother Abel.
But von Trier essentially employs a reverse chronology throughout:

• First the Man and Woman have a child.
  Then they have sex.
  Then it's just the two of them, without children.
  Then they go to Eden.
  Then there is no God to direct and order things ...

Spoiler

(So they undergo mutilation and castration so that they likely won't/can't have children .. but I'm not sure what that's all about it, except Eden is sort of an anti-Paradise as Nature is nasty and chaotic and distinctly ungodly).

Actually I think the whole film is so vague and loosely allegorical that many interps can be fitted in. I didn't really come up with anything for the ending. I thought it represented paganism, which (now that I think about it) does fit in with the anti-chronology, as paganism would equal pre-Christianity.

[Tribe]

What were everyone's thoughts on the handheld camera? I presume it was to create a more nervous experience, but I wasn't wholly convinced, some of the long still shots looking at the cabin were just way too distractingly shaky.

The handheld camera is pretty much standard for Von Trier's movies by now.

[Tribe]

Actually I think the whole film is so vague and loosely allegorical that many interps can be fitted in. I didn't really come up with anything for the ending. I thought it represented paganism, which (now that I think about it) does fit in with the anti-chronology, as paganism would equal pre-Christianity.

I wonder how much was left on the cutting room floor...there seemed to be a lot of business in connection with that drawing of a pyramid He kept referring to...and the whole Gynocide business was used so superficially. It seems he had the kernels of things to work with and develope more fully...who knows if he did before the edit.

And Lemmy, in regard to the second point you make in the spoiler earlier:

Spoiler

does the Cain and Abel notion still hold itself together when you consider Her fantasizing about actually watching the baby go through the window...almost as if she had willed it, perhaps?

[Tommaso]

Lemmy, your reverse chronology interpretation is striking! No kidding.

And I think it still holds together despite of the objection Tribe raised: the reversal might indeed be a 'willed' one, an undoing if not of creation, then of biblical and 'historic' history; if Cain was the first murderer, then the undoing of Cain might have stopped murderous history to occur. I'm not so sure that She represents 'nature' and He 'culture', at least not in a simplistic sense; She might not be 'protecting' nature against culture, but She might simply have a better understanding of how it works. But 'She' is equally or more helpless against nature and has to act according to it in the rest of the film. This would fit with the notion that nature is murderous, a bleak realization that the film surely makes in my view, and which can only be stopped by stopping procreation. In this regard, von Trier's Catholicism (which I never really believed in after this film) might have influenced the film in a much stronger way than I thought.

But I think Lemmy is right that the film is so vague about all this; but again, for me it's not a shortcoming. There are not many films that have inspired such 'esoteric' readings like those we're just discussing here.

[Lemmy Caution]

I thought the film was too much of a mish-mash of ideas -- and ugly to boot.
Didn't care for it much.
But I do think it offers up a fun, undergraduate's fantasy open-ended text which can be interpreted endlessly.

I thought Nature was outside of them and dangerous.
I went with a psychological reading, and had her as the Id and him as the Super-ego. Civilization is repression, so he tries to bully and mold her with his cultural ideas, and she acts all primal on him. Who said Freud was dead?
And again, it's history in reverse, as we start off in a city with culture and rationality in a position of authority and wind up out in nature with primitive urges taking control. Human history unspooled.

In regard to Tribe's point, in the opening scene, it was all so dreamy and unreal that I actually preferred a reading in which they never actually had a child. During the sex act, there are two outcomes -- either a child results or she remains empty and barren. That is, the lack of conception is something like the death of an unborn child, as she imagines it. I kind of enjoyed this uncertainty of whether the child died, or never existed, or if it was a symbolic potential child and a future she mentally conceived of.

Unfortunately the rest of the film kind of hammers away that an actual kid really did die, so my favored interp doesn't really hold water (pun intended).
I think I would have preferred not knowing whether her grief was at the death of her child or at her/their inability to conceive a child. Maybe just me.

I agree with Tribe that there seemed to be more material or ideas which were only partially developed, stillborn, aborted, miscarried, etc.
================================================
Since this is an anti- film, the three wise men get together for a death, not a birth.
Wait til you hear my theory on how the fox = the biblical snake = the devil; the deer = Mary and the stillborn fawn = Jesus. But sometimes a crow is just a crow.

[Phil]

Unfortunately the rest of the film kind of hammers away that an actual kid really did die, so my favored interp doesn't really hold water (pun intended).

I'm not entirely sure of this (that is, I'm disagreeing with your self-disagreement). I think the whole film is so thoroughly subjective (from His point, though) that taking anything as a certainty - even, or maybe particularly, space itself - is a misstep. (That said, I do think they had a Real Child that Really Died, but I'm not sure it makes much of a difference to me anyways.)

Spoiler

One thing I don't think I've noticed anyone else mention yet, which strikes me as a pretty major detail: during the opening montage there is a shot in which the son's shoes are shown laying beneath his bed...backwards. It's very brief, but on a second viewing when I noticed it it really shook up my whole approach to the nature of Defoe's perception of the situation and his interactions with Her/Her Grief, the construction of his paranoia, etc. (Which gets to what I think the whole movie is "about", construction/artificiality/experience, but that's for another, significantly longer, hypothetical post

Oh, and here's a cap of said shot, if you're into that kind of thing and/or think I'm whacky and making things up: http://i37.tinypic.com/2rc7vcx.png

[LQ]

For me, this succeeded only as a total pervasive sensory experience. It gripped me with an ice-cold clench, constricting everything down to my capillaries, and it felt as if there was a great stone put over my lungs... such was the power of the filmmaking in this. Someone invoked Inland Empire a couple of pages back... I'd cite that as the last film that affected me in this way too, but Antichrist got under my skin much more so than any other film in a long time. For that, bravo, Lars.

Substance, however....I agree with Lemmy that it was a messy mishmash of ideas. Although I felt the first two chapters had powerful veracity in the depiction of grieving, I pretty much abandoned thinking about it and focused only on being ensconced in the incredible cauchemar... the sound, look and feel of it, once the action moved to Eden. The images and ideas came at the viewer half-cocked, dripping with self-importance, and whatever LVT thinks about Nature, or Women, or whatever...I couldn't care less. I resented being handed so many jigsaw pieces and being told with a smug sneer, "now puzzle out what I mean by THIS!"
Reading back through this thread, I agree wholeheartedly with zedz in his excellent write-up of it. It was indeed "an extraordinarily silly film" but goddamn was it an amazing and terrifying sensory barrage.

[domino harvey]

I think one of the reasons it succeeds, and I am starting to suspect that I liked it a whole lot more than even its vocal defenders, is that it so encompasses the filmic arts. Antichrist is a film that could only be a film. When I said it felt like a nightmare, I don't mean due to imagery or "scares' or whatever, but more in the sense of helpless immersion in a horrific world fabricated outside of one's choosing. Perhaps von Trier's sensory assault would be more digestible with a stronger narrative? Possibly, but to me it wasn't necessary-- the film clearly eschews conventional Hollywood narrative, and in doing so needs not dally with much, seeing as how that ship sailed at conception. But even beyond the film's aesthetics, I think Antichrist presents, in von Trier's typical gadfly fashion, questions whose answers aren't easily arrived upon as some would glibly declare-- "Well, it's all his joke on Cannes," &c. Someone in this thread disparagingly referred to the "undergraduate"-level plurality of the film, but that strikes me as snobbery-- "How dare someone make an art film in 2009!" Antichrist is a film that is unapologetically alive, one that rejects easy pigeonholing in favor of more intangible arguments. I can understand a lot of reactions to this film, but dismissal is perhaps the most incomprehensible.