LA GRANDE BOUFFE (THE BIG FEAST)
For episode #66 Cole chose LONG TRAIL BREWING'S GREEN BLAZE IPA to go along with our discussion of Lars Von Trier's ANTICHRIST. Get out a knife, a fork, and a really big spoon, and pull up a chair to THE BIG FEAST!
Bon appétit!
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 dark 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, and sexual desire, with 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.
Willem Dafoe, as her therapist husband, tries to head off his wife's teetering nervous breakdown with therapy exercises and goal-oriented exercises that amplify her fear of staying "in the woods." His insistence that they go on the retreat to face her fears, thus healing her mental breakdown, her leads to all sorts of symbolically evil events that surround Gainsbourg as a sexually aggressive and violent woman.
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 obvious ethical concerns for his professional duty as a psychoanalyst that should prevent him from treating a member of his own family. "She," on the other hand, places an inordinate 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 ph
ysical 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 and stark visual cues. 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.
Lars von Trier is a master filmmaker on a mission to fragment reality. 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 (the filmmaking manifesto that he co-wrote) 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.
Rated R. 109 mins.
