Provocative But With Little To Redeem It: A New Voice on ANTICHRIST
As Ive stated already, I was unfortunately unable to catch Antichrist during the press screenings, and was intent upon going to see it tomorrow at a later show. However, while in the queue for the Salle Debussy screener, I got talking to an American gent- Praveen Rathinavelu (who writes for his "School paper", The Tech- not to be underestimated when he's currently studying at Oxford in the UK), who caught my attention with some intriguing insights and a confident critical voice. Hey, who am I to deny someone the opportunity to give their thoughts on a film I wasnt able to see?! So, read on, and let me know what you think. Throughout Lars Von Triers latest film, Antichrist, a therapist (Willem Dafoe) administers a series of psychological exercises to help his wife (Charlotte Gainsbourg) cope with her grief in the wake of a grave domestic event. The exercises are too abstract, and laughably inadequate for addressing the emotions haunting the wifefear, guilt, and desire at their most intense pitches. Von Triers film is similarly infuriating as little more than a collection of these shallow intellectual exercises, interspersed with images that are content to shock and manipulate, rather than offer anything redemptive. Midway through the film, while making his wife confront her paralyzing fear of the woods, Dafoes character self-importantly dismisses the value of dreams in modern psychology, followed by his wife asking, Freud is dead, isnt he? It is an odd moment in a film that is largely focused on the consequences of a child witnessing his parents having sex (in an overblown slow-motion scene, labeled the films Epilogue), followed by the subsequent domestic, sexual, and psychological mutilation his parents endure. Von Trier himself admits that the script was written using about half of physical and intellectual capacity and the images of the film were composed free of logic or dramatic thinking and often came from dreams. Its almost as if he wants us to believe that the film is a nearly unfiltered product of his Freudian unconscious. Maybe it is, but its also a weak, incomplete film, content to make shallow gesturesdistracting and shocking images I can only describe as horror-pornrather than a serious exploration of, well, anything really. To his credit, Von Triers pornographic images, while self-indulgent, are aesthetically powerful. He seamlessly merges the spare, chilling sounds and images of any good horror film with frank, vivid sex scenes. It is easy, at first, to appreciate the way he merges the two genres, in attempt to understand how fear and desire meet in his female protagonists psychology. However, like every other component of the film, we are left unsatisfied. The film leaves little room for the couple to actually interact, and we are left trying to understand the dynamics of their marriage through brief, forced dialogue. Instead, they spend the entire film abusing each other in scenes, which if preceded by some exposition into their characters could have been powerful, but instead offer us nothing. The performances in the film are admirable: both Dafoe and Gainsbourg are placed in physically and emotionally vulnerable positions and give reasonably sympathetic performances, given that their characters are limited to little more than fornicating, punching, andoccasionallychoking each other. Dafoe is particularly convincing as the passive, solipsistic husband, except that it eventual becomes impossible to separate his characterwith all his overwhelming faultsfrom the faults crippling Von Triers difficult, half-conceived film. You kind of leave the film hating everything and everyone. PRSo what do you think? Personally, I'm more than a little impressed, and may well invite Praveen to fill in the unintentional gaps of my coverage in the next few days (four critical eyes are bound to see more than two overtired ones, eh?)- SJG