Lars von Trier's deeply disturbing, often ridiculous film will nonetheless shake you. Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg play a couple grieving their dead child. They go into the woods to heal, and there they find the terror of nature. There's a misogynistic subtext that is unforgivable, and extreme violence, moulded into a sometimes terrible beauty, but it's not easily dismissed.
Starring: Charlotte Gainsbourg, Willem Dafoe
Rating: Three stars out of five
The relationship between the filmmaker Lars von Trier and women may not be of much interest to anyone beyond Mrs. von Trier, but it is an indispensable part of Antichrist, a psycho-religious trek into the forest of the violent, the sexual, the mythosadistic, and the sometimes beautiful wasteland that appears to be the von Trier imagination.
The scenes that have made Antichrist famous -- the genital mutilation, the character who gets a grindstone bolted to his leg (well, back to the old metaphor) -- are both ugly and feverish. Antichrist is a hothouse of images but a wasteland of ideas. In many ways it is a hateful film whose violence has no discernible purpose, but there are undeniable seductions in von Trier's vision, if you can call it that. His nightmares, perhaps.
The movie is about sex and death, at least until the part where the disembowelled fox says, "Chaos reigns," which has become the phrase de la saison, the "I-drink-your-milkshake" tipping point of a film gone mad. After that, well, chaos reigns.
It starts with black-and-white beauty, a lyrical slow-motion sequence in which He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) make slow-motion love while Handel's opera Rinaldo ("May sorrow break the bonds of my anguish," for the non-Italian speakers in the crowd) plays. In another room, their toddler steps onto the window sill and falls, lyrically, to his death. Around this time, von Trier cuts to a graphic sequence of a penis entering a vagina, in case we miss the point: sex, birth, death, and genitalia, all connected. Paging Dr. Freud.
Antichrist is divided into sections entitled Grief, Pain and Despair (Gynocide), and The Three Beggars, named after the Three Beggars statue that was in the dead child's room and that I'm pretty sure was invented by von Trier. If it wasn't, it should have been.
These stages unfold as a psychosexual gavotte of a man trying to exercise control over his wife, which comes as no surprise to those who have seen the torments dealt out to attractive women in von Trier's Breaking the Waves (Emily Watson is sent out to have sex with other men to appease her ailing husband) or Dogville (Nicole Kidman is held as a slave in a small American town). In the aftermath of the child's death, He turns out to be a know-it-all therapist who critiques his wife's style of grieving and even her attempts to work through it ("Never screw your therapist," he says, screwing her.) She is almost catatonic with guilt.
His solution is to go to the place that frightens her the most: into nature. They have a country home called Eden where she had been working on her thesis, a study of the mass murder of witches during the Middle Ages. It sounds like the perfect spot for healing.
Or not. Antichrist is designed as a kind of horror movie of sexual politics and religion, with portent all along the edges of the wood. A deer giving birth runs away; a crow pecks at its young; that awful fox appears with its catchphrase. He puts his hand out the window and pulls it back, covered in snails.
Reason has been put into a blender, although He won't give up on trying to control it. "It's you that's disturbing reality, not the other way around," He tells She (Her?), to which She replies, "Nature is Satan's church," which appears to be the message of Antichrist, or would have been had She added "and Woman is his priestess."
The study of witches, of female power, becomes the central theme of the movie and we are plunged into a terror that rational people -- such as the Ecumenical Jury at the Cannes Film Festival that gave von Trier a special award for misogyny -- might suspect is not exactly gynopositive. Actually, the Dafoe character doesn't come across that great either, and the phantasmagoric visions of Antichrist preclude the conclusions of rational people in any event.
Gainsbourg, who won the best actress award at Cannes, is fearless in a role that seems to bloom out of Gestalt therapy via something by August Strindberg. Dafoe, as Rational Man -- i.e. macho asshole -- maintains his dignity and humanistic balance, although the acting strain shows along the edges. At times, it seems as if the stitching will pop. They both battle through what feels like thick light: cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (Slumdog Millionaire) mutes the colours into appropriate darkness.
The result is at once provocative, baffling, shattering, and laughable, and the maddening thing is, you suspect that's just the way von Trier wants it. He defies you to shrug it off.
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