Black and white scenes, in which the camera moves with a dreamlike slowness, are followed by dazzlingly dyed scenes of claustrophobic carnage. The graceful yet ecstatic beauty of death – literal and symbolic ("la petite mort") – sets the tone. Lars von Trier's new film opens with heart-breaking lyrics of loss and longing from Handel's Rinaldo opera. Joanna Bourke Professor of History, Birkbeck College Behind the greenhouse lies a dark, dank hollow, and on the lawn sits a garrulous fox. It is a place of slithering serpents and Arthur Rackham trees. It's just that, after sitting through Antichrist, I now have an altogether different image of Von Trier's garden. It has a greenhouse." Undeniably, there is something endearing about the image of cinema's ageing enfant-terrible trimming his hedgerows and tending his veg. "It has little hedges around the lettuce and the onions and the cabbage. "It's like an English country garden," he explained. Instead, he aims to lead the life of a convalescent, pottering gently around his garden. When I spoke to him last week, he claimed to have no immediate plans to make another film. Von Trier is now back in Denmark, battling his demons in private. Reason, the director implies, is a paltry defence against elemental forces. In one audacious scene, Von Trier has Dafoe blunder through the bracken where he encounters a talking fox who informs him that "chaos reigns".
And yet for all that, she proves more vital, more powerful, and oddly more charismatic than "He", the arrogant, doomed advocate of order and reason. Yes, the "She" character is anguished and irrational a danger to herself and those around her. But does a fear of femaleness automatically equate to hatred? I'm not convinced that it does. Here is a film that explicitly confronts the director's intertwined fears of primal nature and female sexuality. Von Trier constructs the drama as a fun-house of terrors a warren of dark nooks and crannies, spring-loaded with trap doors and rearing phantoms. Is Antichrist a misogynistic movie? That, inevitably, is in the eye of the beholder. One might even argue that these very qualities are what make it so electrifying. Small wonder, then, that the finished product is so torrid and unrefined, frequently preposterous and on the brink of outright meltdown.
According to Von Trier, he wrote Antichrist on his sickbed while battling an epic bout of depression and conceived the tale as a form of catharsis. For the critics at Time magazine, the film "presented the spectacle of a director going mad".Īs it happens, there may be some truth to this last accusation. Variety labelled it "a big fat art-film fart". Antichrist was accused of rampant misogyny of being "an abomination" "easily one of the biggest debacles in Cannes film history". While Gainsbourg eventually went on to win the best actress award, the director was barracked at the official press conference and the reviews, by and large, were incandescent. Antichrist provided the one bona-fide scandal of this year's festival. If Von Trier had come to cause a stir, he succeeded with bells on. Legend has it that at least four viewers fainted dead away in their seats. Sitting in the dark of the Cannes Palais, the audience yelped and howled and covered their eyes. Oppressive Defoe winds up hobbled and impotent, while Gainsbourg runs clean off the rails and starts hacking at her own genitals with a pair of scissors. Bedevilled by guilt, his unnamed parents – He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) – retreat to a cabin in the woods called Eden. And yet nothing – but nothing – could prepare us for the film that followed.Īntichrist opens, simultaneously, with a blaze of unsimulated sex and the death (simulated, one hopes) of a child, who topples from an upstairs window and cannons into the snow below. This, after all, is the man who once dumped his festival prize in a dustbin, who dragged Nicole Kidman through the wringer in Dogville and provoked hoots of outrage when he won the Palme d'Or for his death row musical, Dancer In The Dark. Over the years the international press has grown accustomed to the antics of the puckish Dane. "Antichrist." At the Cannes film festival, where the film was unveiled in May, the audience responded with indulgent laughter.
T he opening title arrives as a provocation, a mission statement.
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