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| Released: |
2009 |
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| Genre: |
DRAMA
HORROR
CONTROVERSIAL
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| Origin: |
Denmark/ Germany/ France/ Sweden/ Italy/ Poland |
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| Colour: |
C |
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| Length: |
109 |
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Hell.
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Reviewed by Chris Tookey
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Lars von Trier announced after this movie’s Cannes premiere that he is the greatest director in the world, a statement that was greeted with well-justified gasps. On the evidence of this week’s releases, he’s not even the best director in Denmark.
In his defence, he is imaginative. Even in this most maligned of all his films, the demonic Dane and his Oscar-winning cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (who did excellent, though very different, work on Slumdog Millionaire) have created a few images of startling beauty, alongside other framings that I would much rather didn’t linger in my memory.
Parts of the picture are exquisitely crafted. They have a lyricism and a milky, dreamlike quality that evoke memories of the Russian film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky, to whom the film is dedicated.
So why did Antichrist arouse jeers and critical catcalls at Cannes, especially from the French, who are not easily offended? And why has it brought forth so many demands that it be banned?
It is partly because Mr von Trier has earned himself an unenviable reputation for misogyny through Breaking The Waves, Dancer in the Dark and Dogville. Of all his films, Antichrist is the most openly, psychopathically hostile towards women.
Antichrist is a bonkers attempt to merge three extremely different genres - art-house, horror and hard-core pornography - with predictably catastrophic results.
It is too slow and boring in its first two thirds to appeal to fans of horror and pornographic erotica, yet too crude and violent in its final third to satisfy those who pride themselves on having an art-house sensibility.
The schizophrenic confusion of the film is foreshadowed in its prologue, a lustrous, black-and-white sequence of a married couple (played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) making love, into which von Trier tastelessly inserts a single shot of hard-core pornography. This features two body-doubles who operate under the names Horst Stramka and Mandy Starship.
The effect of this clumsy insertion is not so much erotic as laughable. It does nothing for the film except serve early warning that some sequences are going to be unnecessarily graphic.
The sequence is also pretentious, bordering on kitsch, and gratuitously hostile to women. While the couple make love, their baby son is drawn to a window by the beauty of nature – in the form of falling snow. When the child falls, it is a slo-mo, art-house, aestheticised death.
Intercut with the fatality are shots of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s face in a state of erotic exultation. The creepy implication is that somehow she and her child are being punished for her taking pleasure in sex.
This is the first hint of misogyny, but it certainly isn’t the last.
The film that follows is a lengthy, verbose and extremely tedious representation of two souls descending into hell. The expressionistic visuals present images of naked bodies in torment that have a ponderously obvious affinity with the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch.
Both of von Trier’s characters are driven mad by grief. The man, unable to express his despair at the death of his child, devotes himself to controlling his wife’s more flamboyant emotions. As a psychotherapist, he tries to “cure” her, while not tending to his own increasing fear that nature is cruel, if not downright Satanic.
As they repair to their hut in the woods, ironically called Eden, he has visions of a deer carrying a stillborn faun and a fox that eats its own entrails and tells him “Chaos reigns” - a line that is meant to be chilling, but is delivered with such preposterous solemnity that it invites laughter.
As if such hallucinations aren’t enough to unsettle anyone, he discovers that his wife – who has been researching an academic work on witchcraft and the mediaeval fear of women – has come to regard herself, and all women, as Satanically evil. He also finds out that she was secretly, or perhaps unknowingly, torturing their baby son by dressing him in shoes that deformed his feet.
For her part, with her pale face and lank hair, she looks increasingly like one of the mad, oriental women in Japanese horror flicks, and takes hideous, disproportionate revenge on her husband for his kindly but controlling attitude.
She castrates, impales and cripples him, before punishing herself with a repulsive scene of sexual self-mutilation, shown in grisly close-up. He responds by strangling her to death and burning her body.
Normally, I would not give away the film’s ending, but it is right that you be warned about its extreme brutality, and these late scenes are the ones that have aroused the most controversy.
In its defence, Antichrist turns out to be not the picture that I have seen vilified in the press, sometimes by writers who lack any context of recent cinema with which to compare it, and in at least one case by someone who hadn’t even taken the elementary step of seeing it.
For a start, this is not torture porn. The nastiest aspect of torture porn – as manifested in films such as Hostel and Scar 3D - is that it invites the audience to take a voyeuristic, sadistic and quasi-sexual delight in violence and mutilation. Usually, though not invariably, it involves men inflicting extreme pain on women.
In Antichrist, by contrast, the torture is carried out by a woman on a man, and by the woman upon herself. These scenes are extremely graphic, but they are deliberately made unpleasant to watch, and profoundly unerotic. The audience’s sympathies are clearly meant to be with the male suffering the violence, at least up to the point when he turns the tables.
It is a moot point then whether his violent reprisal constitutes a justifiable act of revenge, or reflects the underlying misogyny of the writer-director. Probably, it’s both.
The British Board of Film Classification does have guidelines, and these require cuts in “portrayals of sexual or sexualized violence which might, for example, eroticise or endorse sexual assault”.
However, the BBFC has been disregarding its own guidelines for at least five years. Indeed, they tried to evade enforcement of them as early as 1996, when they awarded an 18 certificate to David Cronenberg’s notorious eroticisation of non-consensual sexual mutilation, Crash.
The sad truth is that there is nothing in Antichrist that this pathetically ineffectual organisation, funded by the film companies and seemingly unaccountable to the public, has not let through before, with an 18 certificate.
We’ve already had graphic images of castration (in, for example, Waz, Captivity and Hostel II), genital self-mutilation (in The Piano Teacher), hard-core pornography (in Shortbus, Destricted and von Trier’s own The Idiots) and women torturing men for pleasure (in Saw III, Straightheads and Baise-Moi).
Antichrist is a horrible combination of extraordinarily unpleasant elements. It’s offensively misogynistic. It’s needlessly graphic in its use of violence. And its maker almost certainly needs psychiatric help.
But if I were you, I would just give it a miss.
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, He - Willem Dafoe 
