Antichrist (2009)

(director: Lars von Trier; starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg)

It’s been too long since we’ve had a film like this (perhaps that’s how it should be). I’m referring more specifically to a work that is authentically controversial, and not that faux-controversy that only occurs whenever you ask certain sections of the bible reading populace. In Antichrist, Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier more or less attempts to use whatever possible means are left to shock an audience that has become emotionally numbed by Hollywood torture-porn flicks and the related genres. Since I generally approach film very objectively I don’t seem to get much visceral thrill from the same scenes everyone else in the theater gasps at, so I was more than curious to see what von Trier could come up with to stir some response from the jaded filmgoer writing this review.

It worked, although not entirely in the way I expected. There are almost no moments shocking jump-cuts that every modern horror movie is made exclusively of, and even in terms of grotesque imagery it’s not as pervasive as I might have imagined it from certain reviews. But there’s a strong, foreboding sense of atmosphere that stuck with me for hours after watching it. I don’t even necessarily mean in terms of the look of the film, but just in the way it treats the narrative and its two central characters (He and She, played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg). That said, it is very present; I don’t want to give anything away but one of the films four ‘chapters’ is subtitled “gynocide”, and even if your goal is to ‘ease’ into the film, von Trier won’t let you as within a minute of the first reel he dives us straight into an extremely graphic sex scene (including close-up of penetration) and watching a small child fall to his death from a high-rise apartment window in super-slow motion after leaning over to catch the snowflakes.

“So what?” many critics of the film will ask. “All this amounts to is a ‘look at me’ sense of showmanship as he tries out different ways to stupefy us with no real ultimate goal behind it all; this is just controversy for controversy’s sake.” While I might agree with that, I would defend the film by pointing out that the fact that he’s able to arouse any sort of intense opinion towards his film, be they positive or negative, could be taken by itself as a sign that he has succeeded. Okay, succeeded from the director’s perspective, but where does that leave us, his audience?

I think the one bit of prior knowledge I had coming into it that ultimately helped me to understand Antichrist is that von Trier was experiencing severe depression as he made this film. Therefore, the way to approach Antichrist should not from the perspective of the characters as part of a fictional narrative, or even as audience members objectively analyzing the events on the screen for themselves, but from the perspective of von Trier. What we then get to witness is no longer even surrealist fiction… and it gets plenty surreal, even inviting us to laugh and step outside the film’s world as von Trier makes Wes Anderson the second filmmaker this year to feature an anthropomorphized fox. It becomes a documentary, chronicling for us the results of a self-tortured creative mind, allowing the chance to intimately connect with the feeling of inescapable, suffocating despair that anyone who understands what that can feel like can at least now take solace in the fact that the people watching it with you also finally understand what it means. Dafoe’s character in particular spends the first 2/3 of the film playing the role of a grief therapist, a personality I’m sure von Trier has had plenty of experience with, and the results are chilling: cold, emotionally detached while at the same time relentlessly prying into those intimate, secret areas in our mind we never want to invite anyone into. The result of all this madness probably makes for one of the more haunting film-going experiences I’ve had in a long time.

(reviewed 11/28/09)

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