Cannes. "Antichrist"

By David Hudson on 05/17/2009

[Updated through 5/27]

"Danish director Lars von Trier elicited derisive laughter, gasps of disbelief, a smattering of applause and loud boos on Sunday as the credits rolled on his drama 'Antichrist' [site] at the Cannes film festival," reports Mike Collett-White for Reuters. "The film, starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as a couple seeking to overcome the grief of losing their only child, has quickly become the most talked-about at this year's festival." And he quotes von Trier from the production notes: "I can offer no excuse for 'Antichrist'... other than my absolute belief in the film - the most important film of my entire career!"

"It's not often that you leave a movie and feel like you've just experienced a moment in cinematic history," writes Charles Ealy in the Austin Movie Blog. "The movie's violence has an emotional impact that hasn't been seen since Gaspar Noé's 'Irréversible,' which premiered here a few years ago. That's because you care about the characters, long before the violence comes."

"The first five minutes of Lars von Trier's 'Antichrist' contain both a scene of eye-opening sexual explicitness and an act of tragic misadventure so extreme that it begs a new word to describe over-the-top: Baroquecoco, maybe." Elizabeth Renzetti for the Globe and Mail writes that Dafoe and Gainsbourg "play an unnamed couple, recovering from a personal tragedy, who retreat to their remote cabin, called Eden, to heal. The religious (and sexual and Freudian) imagery only gets more extreme from there. It's as if 'Don't Look Now' took a huge hit of peyote and moved to the mountains." Von Trier "seems, however nuttily, to be making some point about women, nature and history - though I'm honestly not sure if I know what it is or if he does, either." The film is "loaded with a big trunkful of crazy... Ingmar Bergman meets 'Saw,' let's say."

"Blood spurts, bones are broken, genitals are mutilated... hellooo? Are you still with me?" asks Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum. "The movie looks almost tauntingly great, of course, with von Trier's longtime collaborator (and 'Slumdog Millionaire' Oscar winner) Anthony Dod Mantle as cinematographer. So it's one good-looking, publicity-grabbing provocation, with an overlay of pseudo-Christian allegory thrown in to deflect a reasonable person's accusations of misogyny. As a kicker, the director dedicates the picture to the memory of the great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky - a final flip of the bird to the Cannes audience."

For Jeffrey Wells, this is "easily one of the biggest debacles in Cannes Film Festival history and the complete meltdown of a major film artist... It's an out-and-out disaster - one of the most absurdly heavy-handed and over-the-top calamities I've ever seen in my life."

A few days ago, Gunnar Rehlin spoke with von Trier for Variety, noting first that, two years ago, the director "was hit with a severe and inexplicable depression. It left him bedridden for months, staring at the walls, even unable to decide whether to get up for a glass of water. Part of the road to recovery was reinventing the horror film in the form of 'Antichrist.'" Von Trier: "I'm not religious. I've tried to be, but I can't. If I believe in anything, it is some sort of good power. People can be very nice to each other, and I think that the foundation to survival is kindness and cooperation. But I would not want to be one of God's friends on Facebook." Rehlin: "He says that he has no idea what to do next, or if 'Wasington' - the third film in the trilogy that started with 'Dogville' and 'Manderlay' will ever get made. 'I have spent all my energy on making this bird fly,' he says of 'Antichrist.' 'What's up next, I don't know. First I have to survive Cannes. It can be terrible, but it is part of the job.'"

Update, 5/18: "Lars von Trier cuts a big fat art-film fart with 'Antichrist.'" Variety's Todd McCarthy: "Dividing the narrative into four chapters bracketed by the prologue and an epilogue," von Trier offers "Grief" and then "Pain," which "ends unpromisingly with a disemboweled fox rising out of the ferns to announce, 'Chaos Reigns.' The ante is upped, and a climax of sorts is achieved, in 'Despair,' reassuringly subtitled 'Gynocide'... Suffice to say the woman's mental health takes a turn for the worse, she vividly pleasures her man in a conspicuously unwelcome manner and then, apparently inspired by images of medieval torture inflicted upon women, finds a way to impale him that Hollywood's leading torture-porn experts will kick themselves over not having dreamed up first. But the woman generously saves the most gruesome, preferably unwatched act for herself in the final chapter, the title of which, 'The Three Beggars,' provides no revelations worth waiting for."

"With 'Antichrist,' Lars Von Trier fully lives up to his reputation as an outrageous provocateur and master image-maker," writes Anthony Kaufman for indieWIRE. "In several scenes, Von Trier's sense of foreboding recalls David Lynch, as trees, bushes and images of animal flesh take on a similar sense of uncanny dread.... Dafoe's psychiatrist husband plays the kind of rational man that frequents Von Trier's work - the detective in 'The Element of Crime,' the doctor in the film within 'Epidemic,' Tom Edison in 'Dogville' - all characters whose belief in logic and humanity are proven horribly, ironically, self-destructive." Eventually, "the arrogant husband gets his comeuppance.... While there's no doubt that the place [von Trier] goes is off a precipitous edge, one can't deny the film's continuing primal power."

"This bizarre, increasingly hysterical melodrama for two is ostensibly von Trier's first crack at genre horror, but his nods to convention really serve an attempt to pursue the gender-war theme further than even the director's avowed influence Strindberg," writes Jonathan Romney in Screen. "Sexual politics is manifestly the film's true subject, all the Gothic trimmings coming across as intense but misleading window dressing.... The film's ultimate destination is signalled by the revelation that the wife Gainsbourg had been working on a thesis about witches and the mistreatment of women, although she now seems to have concluded that women are innately evil. It comes as no surprise when marital tensions at last come to a boil in a way that even Ingmar Bergman might have thought a bit steep. In fact, von Trier's models in the culminating sequences seem to be Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty and Stephen King's 'Misery: who would have thought that the mischievous yet high-minded Dane would have provided the latest high-profile torture porn?"

"[Y]ou can say something about the 53-year-old auteur that couldn't be applied to everyone with films in the competition: he's a real moviemaker, a composer of rich imagery as evocative as it is provocative, a master matador at waving a red cape in front of the most jaded viewers and getting them to charge." From Mary and Richard Corliss Cannes diary for Time:

The first half of 'Antichrist' has enough storytelling vigor and sheen convince any critic, including those who thought von Trier went off the rails with his 'Dogville' and 'Manderlay' epics, that, hey, the guy can make a normal movie, and with the highest skill.... It's when Antichrist moves defiantly out of the land of Hitchcock's 'Psycho" and into "Saw" territory that it lost most of its audience Sunday night.... The thought was that we were being subject to the spectacle, not of a woman going mad, but of a director....

What troubles even von Trier partisans is the connection this woman has with some of his other female protagonists. Emily Watson in "Breaking the Waves," Bjork in "Dancer in the Dark," Nicole Kidman in "Dogville" and Bryce Dallas Howard in "Manderlay" are all made to endure, at the rough hands of men, indignations that are depicted so long and lovingly that they seem like exploitation. In the [Knud] Romer interview, von Trier insists that "calling me a misogynist is wrong... I don't think women or their sexuality is evil, but it is frightening." And his view of women is Manichean: they are saints or whores, victims of the most vicious brutality or, as here, perpetrators.

Then again, you never know how serious von Trier is.

"The filmmaker may be insane, but he's got chops," writes Anne Thompson. "He knows how to manipulate an audience. I was enthralled at the start of the film, an extraordinary slow-motion sequence. And the movie does hang together. He knows where he's going. It's just that much like Ken Russell in 'The Devils,' he's taking you to horrifying, hallucinatory places where anything can happen. And where most people don't want to go."

"The film's most successful thematic confrontation is that between frail reason (embodied in the pathetic, infantilizing attempt by the husband, who's a psychotherapist, to treat his deeply disturbed wife with cognitive therapy) and the uncontrollable forces of emotion and mystery that emerge victorious," writes Peter Brunette in the Hollywood Reporter. "Another powerful idea, that nature is cruel and vicious and completely antithetical to human welfare, seems to align von Trier with the German visionary director Werner Herzog.... In any case, all the ideas of the film are so extravagantly and feverishly expressed that one fears that von Trier, always working on the edge, has finally become unhinged."

"When it was all over, we staggered up the aisles," blogs Roger Ebert: "Manohla Dargis, the merry film critic of the New York Times, could be heard singing 'That's Entertainment!' Whether this is a bad, good or great film is entirely beside the point. It is an audacious spit in the eye of society.... Von Trier is not so much making a film about violence as making a film to inflict violence upon us, perhaps as a salutary experience.... This is the most despairing film I've ever have seen." Von Trier "has made a film that is not boring. Unendurable, perhaps, but not boring. For relief I am looking forward to the overnight reviews of those who think they can explain exactly what it means. In this case, perhaps, a film should not mean, but be."

Karina Longworth reports on the press conference at the SpoutBlog. More from indieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez: "'I am the best film director in the world,' Lars Von Trier proclaimed provocatively today when pressed to defend his Cannes competition entry, a quote that will surely follow him for some time to come."

Daniel Kasman in The Auteurs' Notebook: "Hip-hip-hurray for Lars von Trier's 'Antichrist,' a ballsy B-movie riff off Bergman and Tarkovsky by way of 'Evil Dead' that treads over the whole gamut of art-house clichés, was clearly improvised day in and day out, and emerges from this morass of portentousness and pretentiousness as a hilarious, fucked up and unqualifiable experiment in make it so cinema."

"Let's hear it for Lars von Trier," comes another cheer, this one from the Boston Globe's Wesley Morris. "'Antichrist' is the most hilarious anti-entertainment movie at the festival so far - whether von Trier means it to be is another matter. Either way, the screening was fun.... I watched the last half with my mouth open. I don't think I breathed. My seatmate and I took turns grabbing each other - out of shock, out of stress, out of disbelief. (Oh, Charlotte, no. Don't snip that, sweetie.) At some point, I found myself reaching around the edges of my chair. I was looking for a seatbelt."

"I personally had a ball," writes Stephen Garrett in a dispatch to Time Out New York. Von Trier's "provocations stand as some of the most reliably satisfying in cinema today. This is gonzo drama at its most feral, an instinctive and wry mashup of dreamlike images (lusciously lensed by the talented Anthony Dod Mantle) and fairy-tale logic. It touches on primal nerves while stubbornly exuding a childish petulance for conventional resolution. Be shocked. Be awed. But don't forget to laugh, wickedly."

"'Antichrist' is the most original and though-provoking work von Trier has done since 'Breaking the Waves.' That said, I might entirely change my mind tomorrow - yet another reason why this film is remarkable." For now, David Bourgeois's giving it a 9 out of 10 at Movieline.

"Am I as screwed up as either of the characters in 'Antichrist' if I say I had a blast watching this?" wonders FirstShowing's Alex Billington.

As it happens, the film currently being discussed at the Oldest Established Really Important Film Club is "Dancer in the Dark."

"I don't ever remember Tarkovsky being so inventive with a box of rusty old tools." Even so, just 2 out of 6 stars for "Antichrist" from Dave Calhoun in Time Out London.

"Like Tarkovsky's 'Solaris,' the thrust of 'Antichrist' comes out of a familiar narrative backdrop, which Von Trier subtly intellectualizes, struggling against all odds to transcend the boundaries of the form or at least create a spectacular failure in the process." Eric Kohn at the Wrap: "In the case of 'Solaris,' this meant turning a basic science fiction concept into high art; with 'Antichrist,' Von Trier intends to broaden the thematic potential of cinematically-induced fear."

Online listening tip. Here at IFC, Matt Singer and Alison Willmore discuss what's turning out to be the most discussable film at Cannes so far this year.

"What is it about?" That's a rhetorical question. From the Telegraph's Sukhdev Sandhu: "Something to do with modern-day therapy as a doomed attempt to deal with the elemental forces that both divide and compel men and women? I'm not sure. I found it upsetting, absurd, totally deranged. But no more obscene than the medieval tracts that inspired it. 'Antichrist' is a film about pain that is itself in pain."

"If the laughs are slow to boil in 'Antichrist' it's largely because of the ugly opener, in which the couple's toddler falls out an upper-story window to his death," blogs Manohla Dargis for the New York Times. "That's a tough way for any movie to begin but it's especially unpleasant because the death has no meaning in and of itself (and certainly no emotional resonance). Rather, it's a narrative device, as evident from how the death, shown in slow motion, is crosscut with images of the couple making passionate love. From the way Mr von Trier trains his camera on Ms Gainsbourg's open mouth, gaping in a pantomime of ecstasy, it's also all-too obvious that mother love is a kind of abyss, one into which everyone - child and husband included - are destined to tumble.... Chaos reigns if not narrative sense, but I would be lying if I didn't admit that this impossible movie kept me hooked from start to finish."

At the AV Club, Mike D'Angelo writes an open letter to Lars von Trier: "I'm pretty sure I kind of despised your new movie, 'Antichrist,' but that doesn't remotely matter. Thank you. Thank you for having the guts to make something as insane and offensive and wholly uncompromising as this. Thank you for not caring whether people laugh at you, and for smacking the international press corps with a much-needed dose of cognitive dissonance. Most of all, thank you for lighting a bomb underneath the perfectly respectable, largely forgettable efforts of your fellow Competition entries. You may have whiffed huge this time, but movies like yours are what the Festival de Cannes should ideally be about."

"'Dogville' hit a home run; 'Antichrist' takes a big swing and scratches out an infield single," blogs J Hoberman for the Voice. "Fearsomely ambitious, the movie resembles Bergman's 'Scenes From a Marriage,' in its nightmare conjugal claustrophobia, and Kubrick's 'The Shining,' in its foredoomed attempt to be the scariest movie ever made. Literal hallucinations seem clumsy and gratuitous; von Trier not only terrorizes the audience with the death of a child and the spectacle of mental disintegration, but with torture, castration, extreme self-mutilation, and supernatural bad vibes."

"Already 'Antichrist' is becoming a part of Cannes legend," blogs Matt Singer. "I heard two different stories today about people fainting at screenings - which means no one will ever get to see this movie the way that first audience got to see it. And once you know a film is quote-unquote shocking, and watch it with that expectation, you've changed the viewing experience. It's the difference between walking into an ambush and walking to the gallows..... Maybe von Trier thought the only way to approximate the pain suffered by the characters on screen was to assault the audience with some of the most graphically unsettling images imaginable. Or maybe he just thought making 2300 stuffy rich people in tuxedos all gasp at the same time would be a great laugh. And I'll be honest here: I really don't know. Based on my conversations with others here in Cannes, it seems nobody really does."

"If the film were not so cold and emotionally uninvolving then the arty torture porn element might be more upsetting," writes Wendy Ide in the London Times. "But given how desperate to shock the film is, it's surprising that long swathes of it are so turgidly dull. Von Trier cites Strindberg as a major influence and it's true that the two characters feel less like a husband and wife than a pair of strangers in a rather stale and dated play."

Online viewing tip. The succinct context of some of those controversial remarks: Politiken has just under three minutes of the press conference, but all the quotes you've heard are right here.

Updates, 5/19: "Will the outage surrounding Antichrist increase its chances of winning the Palme d'Or?" wonders Melissa Anderson in a dispatch to Artforum. Consider, she suggests, jury prez Isabelle Huppert and jury member Asia Argento.

"There are some scary moments in 'Antichrist,' no doubt about it, with moods and images that recall Polanski's 'Rosemary's Baby,' or even Carl Theodor Dreyer's 'Day of Wrath,'" writes Peter Bradshaw. "However clunky some of the translated-English dialogue, and however leaden and absurd the performances, weird stabs and shivers of fear do emerge." Ultimately, though, "Von Trier takes none of this seriously. It is just a precariously balanced bucket of blood positioned over the door - a technically accomplished hoax of ineffable nastiness."

Also for the Guardian: Xan Brooks, "I stumble out in a daze, momentarily unsure whether I loved it or loathed it. Abruptly I realise that I love it." And: "I think I may have enjoyed it," concedes Mark Brown. "But he's got to be joking if he's the best director in the world."

"[T]he audibly indulgent laughter that greeted the talking fox told me I wasn't the only crit who'd figured out over the years that getting worked up about von Trier's wilfulness just means you're taking him altogether too seriously," blogs Tom Carson for GQ.

Fabien Lemercier talks with von Trier for Cineuropa.

Updates, 5/20: "Lars von Trier's new film will not leave me alone," blogs Roger Ebert. "It is obvious to anyone who saw 'Breaking the Waves' that von Trier's sense of spirituality is intense, and that he can envision the supernatural as literally present in the world. His reference is Catholicism. Raised by a communist mother and a socialist father in a restrictive environment, he was told as an adult that his father was not his natural parent, and renounced that man's Judaism to convert, at the age of 30, to the Catholic church. It was at about the same age that von Trier founded the Dogma movement, with its monkish asceticism.... I believe 'Antichrist' may be an exercise in alternative theology: von Trier's version of those passages in 'Genesis' where Man is cast from Eden and Satan assumes a role in the world."

"Even without that publicity image [see left], Hitchcock is a natural reference for 'Antichrist,' insomuch as it's a psychological thriller that looks like art but satisfies as a work of genre," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "It's essentially a revenge of the witch/bitch movie, one which stacks together a few basic horror movie themes: ancient burial grounds, mythology come to life, sex as a precursor to death, and female sexuality in particular as potentially equivalent to a supernatural force of nature. Antichrist does flip the script of the modern gore fest by putting a relatively chaste man at the mercy of a female whose sexuality is in crisis, thus turning Carol Clover's 'final girl' theory on its head. This may be bait enough for those quick to cry misogyny, but what I think is more remarkable is how far Von Trier goes to justify the woman's eventual physical torture of her husband.... You can put me on the 'pro' side on Antichrist, although I'm not without my reservations."

"Perhaps I've become inured to von Trier's provocations, though I found 'Antichrist' neither an assault on humanity, nor art, nor a particularly effective or interesting movie," writes Patrick Z McGavin in Stop Smiling.

IFC Films has picked up "Antichrist" for the US, reports indieWIRE's Brian Brooks.

Online viewing tip. Xan Brooks talks with Gainsbourg. Do watch that one.

"It's really quite laughable to think that when Von Trier first began talking about a return to horror a few years back he was openly citing the need to make some money as a primary reason for doing so," notes Todd Brown at Twitch. "The idea that 'Antichrist' could be considered a commercial film in any sense is absolutely absurd. It is and will be the most transgressive film of this year and very likely of a great many to come. It goes well beyond the bounds of good taste in its effort not just to shock - this is no 'Hostel' - but to provoke, an exercise that will leave many angry and hostile while others will declare the film a masterpiece. Having mulled it over for a good many hours I fall cleanly into the second category."

"I don't know if it's smart, but I like it," writes Tim Hayes in the Critic's Notebook. "Or more truthfully: I like the fact that Lars von Trier, consumed by whatever black humor and profound doubts fill his days, can create a film so uncompromising, so despairing and so wickedly contrarian that it defies criticism and explanation in equal measure.... 'Antichrist' hangs together perfectly, but in the same way a piece of automatic writing does. What I think it means may be totally different than Mr von Trier's beliefs, but I don't think he's very bothered by that. So why should I be? Épater les cinéastes."

The New York Times' Dave Itzkoff passes along reports that von Trier will be making cuts so as to make "Antichrist" commercially viable in the US.

David Bourgeois talks with Dafoe for Movieline.

Update, 5/21: "The only difference between 'Antichrist' and less high-minded 'torture porn' cheapies is that, in 'Antichrist,' nobody gets off," writes James Rocchi for MSN. "One critic walked out of 'Antichrist' vibrating, saying, 'Palme d'Or, baby!,' suggesting von Trier's film was a natural for the fest's highest honor. If that happens, I'm going to come home, pick out a favorite contestant on 'Survivor' to root for, start watching NASCAR and reading nothing but Dan Brown books, because that will be a clear sign that, in the words of Christian Bale, high art and I are done, professionally."

Update, 5/22: "What's easily missed is structure," writes David Phelps in The Auteurs' Notebook. "Where every other film in Cannes imposes a style onto the movie that's endured a couple of hours, 'Antichrist' reinvents itself every few minutes, but also takes a germ of an old idea - a couple that needs each other to express their desperation - and lets it ripen to its further of far-flung conclusions: castration, impalement, and an irritated Willem Dafoe stuck in a hole in the ground between a bird about to eat his eyes out on one side, and his wife about to stab him in the back on the other. There's a 'Night of the Hunter' Loony Toons horror of narrative, form, and two lovers in constant free-fall; von Trier, spontaneous but never arbitrary, has made a movie about two people trying to make sense of their fears and hates through diagrams of 'fear pyramids' and mythic constellations, that's every bit as preposterous in its irrationality as its characters attempts to rationalize."

Update, 5/23: For the Los Angeles Times, Dennis Lim meets von Trier for a chat at the Hotel du Cap, a luxury resort up the coast from the bustle of the Croisette. 'I didn't expect it but there's been a lot of hostility. It seems the film kind of gets to people somehow.'"

Update, 5/27: For Cineuropa, Annika Pham reports on a "strong opening" in Denmark.

Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 2009.

[Photo: "Antichrist," Zentropa, 2009]

Tags: Cannes 2009, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Danish Cinema, Lars von Trier, Willem Dafoe