Film Review: Lars Von Trier’s ANTICHRIST!
This movie throws the rule book out the window, though not before subjecting it to all kinds of debasement. It’s like Antichrist shatters all of your preconceptions- normally a good thing- but this time in a way that leaves you cold, disoriented, and wanting nothing more than to return to your original state of conceptual naivety. Think your soul is already withered and you’ve seen it all? Think again! Think you’re clever and sophisticratic enough to attribute a meaningful design to even the most cryptic and slow-moving of Art House films? Maybe not! Think you’re man enough to see what the green goblin’s dick looks like when it ejaculates blood? No!
From a narrative point of view, Antichrist is divided into two distinct parts: a painfully slow, often awkward string of dialogues between a couple that have lost their child and a reign of chaos. The themes that inhabit the first part are quite conspicuous: dead babies, lust, pride, and the state of nature (or, how human sexuality can lead to dead babies). Really, it’s quite boring, and anyone who finds their way to this movie based on anecdotes of how fucked up it is will start to wonder if they picked up the wrong Antichrist. Just hang in there until William Defoe first hears the acorns cry and discovers a talking fox, because then part two is on like Donkey Kong.
And seriously, what a part it is. The last half of the movie feels like Lars watched the first half, realized that there’s nary a person who’s been raped yet, so he subsequently poured the whole spectrum of human folly in to insulate his ‘gasp!’ street cred. Once the fox sounds off, it’s a nonstop romp of sex, blood, and psychotherapy. At one point, it even gets all cute and self-referential when Charlotte Gainsbourg asks if Freud is dead. Well, if Freud really is dead, Lars Von Trier never got the memo!
If you find yourself wondering how a parent’s grief can transform into an exploration of gynocide before slipping into an orgy, then a phase of orgy-violence, and then finally settle on violence-violence; don’t worry because you’re not alone. Times like this you just gotta accept that either the director is simply smarter than you or they’re on a regime of narcotics that effectively place them on a higher plane of existence. After all, everyone leaves a theatre with their own take on a movie. For me, Antichrist is unmistakably a film about redemption, as evidenced by the knowing look that the crow gives William Defoe at the end, absolving him of his prior crow-killing transgressions while trapped in the vagina hole/womb. Others might take home a life-long impression of the graphic scenes of genital mutilation. In these subjectivities we discover the true power of film.
Posted: January 15th, 2011 under Uncategorized.