Over the course of putting Nicole Kidman, Emily Watson and Icelandic pop star Björk through hell – to some degree both on the set and on-screen –Lars von Trier gained a reputation for making misogynistic films which revel sadistically in the abuse of often helpless and kind-hearted women.
Björk even charged that Trier “needs a female to provide his work [with a] soul, and he envies them and hates them for it, so he has to destroy them during the filming.”
It seems reasonable, then, that Trier oriented his next project to tackle this question head-on. Except Antichrist, which the Danish director famously rewrote during a bout of depression in 2007, seems not to disavow Trier’s putative misogyny but to reaffirm it.
Focusing exclusively on Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as an unnamed couple (they are called He and She in the script), Antichrist begins with its protagonists in mid-coitus (brief, full-penetration close-up and all), oblivious to the fact that their young son has escaped from his crib and clambered up to an open window.
|
Antichrist Directed by Lars von Trier |
As they climax, he falls.
Set to a hauntingly lovely aria from Händel’s Rindalo, it is a beautiful and indelible opening scene, but also a cheap one: throes of passion . . . death throes. The association is so easy as to be juvenile, but then that has always been characteristic of Trier, whose cinematic signature is equal parts Hitchcockian auteur and impertinent film student.
Dafoe plays a therapist, so when he doesn’t think much of the care received by his grief-stricken wife – he views her month-long hospitalization as an unwanted and unwarranted interment –he takes over her care and finds himself performing a manifestly unhealthy balancing act between twin roles as a husband and a therapist.
Exposure therapy is central to his notion of healing his wife, although his inexplicable switch in focus from coping with grief to facing fear is both jarring and mystifying, as he seems neither sadistic nor foolish. In particular, he resolves to return with her to the place she took their son the previous summer to write her thesis paper on gynocide, a cabin called Eden.
And here emerges Lars Trier the undergrad, the one who assumed a “von” in homage to Germanic filmmakers Erich von Stroheim and Josef von Sternberg, with a fistful of animal and biblical metaphors, long on heavy-handed symbolism (which is often effective nonetheless) and seemingly short on real ideas about what exactly he is trying to say.
In Eden, Antichrist climaxes with a violent, phantasmagoric battle of the sexes and a rather threadbare riff on original sin all bound up with the wife’s prior gynocide research. The depiction is as raw and relentless as anything in Trier’s The Idiots, but if the question is whether it justifies itself, the answer must be a tentative no.
Given that the storytelling is mean, cynical, and somewhat pretentious, the only pleasantness or beauty in Antichrist comes courtesy of cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, who offers us a dozen lushly photographed, slow-motion tableaux interspersed throughout the film. These are set immediately apart by their crystalline beauty from the unfiltered roughness of the other scenes, which are shot hand-held, like The Idiots and other films which subscribed to the low-tech, “honest” Dogme95 manifesto.
Antichrist also has marvelous performances in its favour; watching Gainsbourg and Dafoe is like looking in through the neighbour’s window upon an argument – something akin to the uncomfortable first meeting between the Wheelers and Michael Shannon’s troubled John Givings in Revolutionary Road. Gainsbourg looks somber and waifish even in the flashbacks to happier times, but the pair of them at the top of their game is enough to make you forget you are only watching a film.
Rife with confrontational taboos and featuring more genital mutilation and general physical trauma than you would wish upon your worst enemy, Antichrist is certainly not everyone’s cup of tea. Let us not forget this is a horror movie, so it is not supposed to be easy viewing to begin with, but Trier offers up a more cerebral take on the genre than Hollywood is accustomed to doing and manages to elicit more genuine discomfiture than all the Saw and Hostel movies combined.
That said, Antichrist is less a meditation on anything specifiable and concrete than a mad artist’s fever dream, hitting either above or below the level of consciousness and intellect for a wildly visceral experience. All thematic concerns and implications aside, it is a film that is very difficult to forget. Whether that is for better or for worse will depend on the viewer.
Lars von Trier’s Antichrist is playing Feb. 5 – 9 at the Bytowne Theatre and Feb. 24 – 28 at the Mayfair Theatre.