“Never screw your therapist – no
matter how much your therapist might love it.”
“Nature is Satan’s church.”
“I’ve been having a lot of weird
dreams.”
“Dreams are of no interest to
modern psychology. Freud is dead, isn’t he?”
Rebounding from a bout of severe
depression that he claims left him unable to work, Danish Dogme 95 daddy Lars
von Trier has returned to some of his favorite themes and devices in a new film
provocatively called Antichrist. Von Trier won a loyal and sometimes
uncritical following for his 1996 masterwork Breaking the Waves, in
which a naïve young woman embarks on a series of affairs in the hope of somehow
alleviating her husband’s paralysis. Bold in content and style Breaking the
Waves virtually ensured that every time the self-taught cinema rebel got up
on the diving board there would eager fans waiting to see if there was water in
the pool. Perhaps no world class director is capably of bouncing from five
stars to none with the same band of critics.
Sadly with Antichrist the
pool is nearly bone dry, with the notable exception of a riveting prologue
where the filmmaker sets his doomed couple up for their bloody fall from grace.
In a brilliant display of content married to style we see a mature couple, we
will know only as He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg), heading for
orgiastic bliss, while their pre-school son, Nic (Storm Acheche Sahlstrom)
escapes from his crib and hurtles to his death out an unlatched window,
accompanied by his teddy bear. Von Trier pulls every style rabbit out of his
pocket making glorious use of slow motion, b/w images, parallel action –
hauntingly the mother’s orgasm is expertly synched to her baby boy’s fatal
plunge, implicitly indicting, perhaps, female sexual expression, or maybe all
erotic pleasure.
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Nic’s death pushes She into a
virtual catatonic state of grief which He foolishly attempts to address by
arrogantly substituting himself for her regular therapist and insisting that
the therapy take place in an isolated forest cabin, henceforth and rather
portentously labeled “Eden.”
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Curiously von Trier addresses Antichrist’s
dangling cinema metaphors in a witty production notes conversation with an
actor from an earlier film, The Idiots, Knud Romer. He doesn’t address
them on screen, however, leaving his talented cast to frolic frantically in and
around the cabin with a weird collection of mechanized forest creatures,
including a seemingly rabid fox who suddenly finds a voice, “Chaos reigns!” At
which point the Friday date night crowd I was with broke into a nervous and
partially mocking wave of laughter. Advisory: if you don’t wish to see hardware
tools employed in genital mutilation and worse, take the fox’s cry as your cue
to exit the theatre. Believe me you’ll only miss the gore, no edification is
forthcoming.
Dafoe and Gainsbourg are troopers
delivering the maximum, even in the buff. If you want to wait for Antichrist
on DVD, you might rent The Cement Garden, a 1992 family implosion
drama where Gainsbourg falls into an incestuous bond with the actor playing her
teenage brother – directed by her uncle, Andrew Birkin, based on a story by Ian
McEwan.