If it’s really true that there is no such thing as bad publicity, then the premiere of Antichrist at Cannes last year was a smashing success for Lars von Trier. The film turned the traditionally vocal, yet restrained Cannes audience into something akin to a Rocky Horror Picture Show festival. There were catcalls, laughs, groans and many, many boos. A handful of people walked out, but most stuck around to the end where they greeted Von Trier’s dedication to the Great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky with a mixture of loud scoffs and disbelieving laughs.
It was all people at Cannes could talk about that week. “How could a director, even one as controversial as Von Trier, think that people would take this film seriously?” “How could someone be so selfish and pretentious to believe that whatever sick shit they could imagine was worth being put in a film and shown to the most respected film crowd on Earth”? The prevailing notion was that Von Trier had used the respect his name garnered, to pull a fast one on the movie-going public. In my opinion, after watching the film five times, they were pretty much right.
Forget all the talk about how the film is Von Trier’s catharsis; his way of dealing with a deep depression. This is, plain as day, a giant “fuck you!” to his critics. Through the three films of his “Golden Heart Trilogy” and the two released films of his “USA – Land of Opportunity” trilogy, Von Trier has been branded a misogynist of the highest order. Critics cite the emotional and physical devastation he rains down on his heroines as well as the lack of redemption he affords them as evidence of some sort of lingering hatred for the female gender. So how does he respond; by showing us the absolute physical, emotional and metaphorical coming-apart of a woman. It’s as if Von Trier is saying to his critics, you thought I abused Grace? You thought I was unmerciful to Selma? Well let me show you what those words actually mean.
The film opens with the ultra-stylized slow-motion death of Nick, the infant child of He and She. Set to a vocal arrangement by Handel, the scene plays out with both beauty and inevitability. Anthony Dod Mantle paints this scene in such a stylish black and white, that it feels like watching a dream. We are then transported to the hospital and the world of color, as we learn that She (Gainsbourg) took things pretty hard, and has been bed-ridden for a month. Released into the supervision of her husband (Defoe), she returns to their home where the film essentially starts its descent into madness. Despite being a skilled psychologist, He is completely outmatched by the crazy slowly creeping in to She’s psyche yet, in the film’s tragic catalyst, he fails to realize it.
Eventually the couple makes the trek to their cabin in the woods (Eden), and Von Trier pulls back the curtain revealing himself standing there with a giant middle finger to his audience, with a shot of a deer galloping through the woods with a still-born fetus hanging from its hindquarters. I imagine this is the point in the film where the audience went “oh shit, Von Trier lost his fucking mind”. But he didn’t. The beauty of the opening scene and the quiet of the buildup to Eden is a red-herring. Von Trier wants to pull the audience into his world, get them off balance, and then unleash Eden upon them. In a sense, Defoe is the manifestation of the audience on the screen. He has no idea what awaits him in Eden because he doesn’t fully comprehend the damage Nick’s death has done to She.
Von Trier equates nature (the birds, the trees etc.) as depicted by Eden, with human nature, specifically the nature of women, as depicted by She. She tells her husband that she fears Eden, and he believes it is because it reminds of her son, who she spent time alone with there a few months prior to his death. However, what she really fears about Eden is her own female nature. She subconsciously feels responsible for Nick’s death and, though she can’t vocalize it, feels that something is terribly wrong somewhere deep inside her. When they arrive to Eden, She cannot bear to step on the grass. She is not ready to confront her own female nature, and that manifests itself as feeling as though the grass at Eden is burning her feet.
While in Eden, we slowly see She’s demeanor towards He begin to change. We already know she believes him to have been a detached father, but we begin to see a much more base and animalistic hatred start to manifest. As her demeanor towards him changes, so too does the behavior of nature towards him. He wakes up one morning with bugs covering his hand, he steps outside to a downpour of acorns and he is confronted by a self-cannibalizing fox telling him more about the state of his wife’s psyche then he could garner from hours of speaking with her… “chaos reigns”. Yet it isn’t until he discovers her thesis, and hears her describe it to him that he realizes the problem, and his mistake. Nick’s death was merely the tragically perfect catalyst to her mental break. She already had a warped and delusional view of the nature of women, of her own nature. The fact that her son died while she was busy fulfilling her womanly desires was a once and a million straw in the camel’s back.
He realizes this, but too late. It takes him a while to catch up, to put things together, and before he does She suffers a total mental break. I’ll skip over the gory details, but Von Trier basically takes She apart physically and metaphorically as totally as he had mentally throughout the first hour of the film.
Like most, I hated the film the first time I saw it. I hated it the second time I saw it. However, it has grown on me in subsequent viewings. Yes, Von Trier is overly indulgent in almost every way imaginable. From the un-simulated sexual acts to the much-too-obvious camera tricks (the wavy effect when She runs from the cabin symbolizing her growing detachment from reality… come on Lars!), the film occasionally comes across like a film student trying to use all the techniques he knows at the same time. As a whole however, I now view the film as a massively-flawed masterpiece. I groan at times while watching it. I laugh and I even boo (not really). But at the end, when it cuts to black right before He is overrun by nature (woman’s nature), I feel like I’ve watched one of the most important films of my lifetime.
Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard
Directed by: Kenji Mizoguchi
Directed by: Francois Truffaut
Directed by: Terrence Malick
Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard
