Savoring von Trier
The Best Horror Film of the Last 30 Years
By Cole Smithey
Lars von Trier is a true poet of cinema. He has a painterly eye for
composition –formal, surrealistic, and radical. In a natural setting
of a remote cabin named Eden hidden deep in the woods of the Pacific
Northwest, von Trier scorches his mark with one of the most shocking
horror films of the past 30 years. The Danish filmmaker creates a tense
and provocative collage of death, brutality, psychotherapy, sexual
desire, and the fury of Mother Nature. A symphony of simultaneous
madness afflicting the females of various species of animals parallels
the mental deterioration of a wife (Charlotte Gainsbourg) after the
death of her son–who fell out a window while the couple was making
love. Dafoe, as her therapist husband, tries to head off his wife's
teetering nervous breakdown with therapy exercises and goal-oriented
games that amplify her fear of staying at Eden. His insistence that
they go on the retreat to face her fears and heal her leads to all
sorts of symbolically evil events that surround Gainsbourg as a
sexually aggressive and violent wife.
Von
Trier toys with implying an archetypal status to the husband, referred
to only as "He," and Gainsbourg's character, credited as "She." "He" is
a logical person, who substitutes the remorse he feels for the loss of
his child with curing his deeply disturbed wife even if such an effort
contradicts ethical concerns for his professional duty as a
psychoanalyst that would prevent him from treating a member of his own
family. "She," on the other hand, places importance on sex as a way of
distancing herself from the result of the activity that was responsible
for bringing her son into the world and for inadvertently casting him
out.
After
its press screening at the New York Film Festival, I asked von Trier
about the implications of the film's biblical references, such as
naming the couple's isolated retreat "Eden" and an oblique reference to
"Satan." The candid filmmaker replied that if anything it was to reject
the existence of God. Von Trier has publicly discussed his battle with
depression that led to writing "Antichrist" as a kind of self-therapy
before filming the movie with a lazy approach that took full advantage
of employing free association to add or augment scenes. The auteur
sites Strindberg as an influence, and you can recognize it in von
Trier's formal distillation of social and personal ideas. "Antichrist"
is broken into three stages, "Grief," "Pain," and "Despair." But the
terms play so loosely with the action of each act that the superseding
action on display challenges the audience to equate the horrors
on-screen with traumatic events in their own lives.
Like
Luis Bunuel, von Trier works from a rich subconscious narrative
landscape where adult fears and fantasies are played out beyond their
illogical parameters. Where a film like "The Exorcist" works on a
corollary algorithm pitting good against evil, von Trier embraces the
cruelty of nature, with its psychological frailty and physical
vulnerability pressed hard to the fore. That he does so within an
intimate romantic context that calls into play furious aspects of
sadomasochistic sexuality that fire the film into an area of implacable
volatility.
"Antichrist"
is a demanding film that pushes its dark ideas and exaggerated
situations through a dialectic of carefully guided precepts. As with
Alfred Hitchcock, Lars von Trier deploys a direct cinematic language
that allows the audience to trust in his mastery of filmic art, as well
as his ability to gross them out without breaking their confidence. Von
Trier is a master filmmaker. His exploration into the genre of horror
has given us a film far more frightening than anything Hollywood would
ever allow. As with all of von Trier's films, there's some Dogme for
the audience to chew on. If "Antichrist" is the "most important film of
von Trier's career," as he has stated, then there is all the more
reason to savor it.
(IFC Films) Rated R. 109 mins. (A) (Five Stars)
