From Pops Corn, OTBKB's film critic, a reaction to the new Lars von Trier movie.
I recently saw my friend Joey perform with his band in Manhattan. After the show, Joey told me that he was his own favorite musical artist. He knew how conceited this sounded, but his own work just really appeals to him and he really likes what he does. If only more of us felt this way. One who apparently does is Dutch filmmaker Lars von Trier. His Cannes press conference when he called himself the “best director in the world” raised the ire of the international film-going community, who took the bait, just adding to the controversy already caused by Antichrist, a film with vicious graphic violence, mostly sexual, and all caused after the death of a child, long considered cinema taboo #1. Rising to the bait is essential to admiring von Trier. I see him as little more than a prankster with his ridiculous Dogma rules and films that gleefully pull the rug out from under the audience. Despite the title of the prankster documentary on the Yes Men (which I swear is on its third New York run, does this movie play here every year?) pranks don’t really save the world. Still, the “most shocking film in the history of Cannes” buzz around Antichrist got to me and I’ve been eagerly anticipating von Trier’s latest for some time. After salivating for months, the thirst was quenched last night at the IFC Film Center.
There is some frank stuff here and some of the well-documented final third of the film offers some explicit sequences that are cinematic firsts to my knowledge, but I think it deserves more than the arthouse horror flick label it has earned. It came off to me as a very personal piece on grief and fear (something von Trier is often associated with, notably his fear of flying). It’s also stunningly shot, purely cinematic and offers an a view of therapy that seems very raw, particularly interesting considering that von Trier has said the film was therapy for him as the ideas were coming from him during a depressed time in his life.
Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe are the only characters in the film. She and He. I hate hearing that actors give a “brave performance,” but something about these two, Gainsbourg especially, was really admirable in the way they went for it. And not only in relation to the explicit sickness on display. Gainsbourg’s screams, for example, truly feel like they’re coming from a place of true pain.
The film is dedicated to Andrei Tarkovsky, a filmmaker who I admire but less so than the masters with whom he is most often associated (Robert Bresson, Carl Theodore Dreyer and Yasujiro Ozu). Filmed in Tarkovsky’s style, complete with perma-fog, mirror effects and mad nature wanderings, the film has the same psychological rigor as the Russian filmmaker’s work, but by treading where Tarkovsky would not. This recalls von Trier’s film version of Medea in which he made an unrealized Dreyer project by using his influence’s style. Medea, which is out there on DVD even if it’s hard to find, is my favorite of von Trier’s work and Antichrist is right there behind it. I guess I like the non-von Trier, the non Trier, when he’s appropriating the style of another. And I had a stronger reaction to this than I have any Tarkovsky work.
And it may seem like a jump, but Antichrist is only half as outrageous to me as one of the new A Christmas Carol posters plastered all over town. New Yorkers are used to seeing filth all over the place, but I shake my head every time I think that a team of people approved the poster in which Jim Carrey’s animated Scrooge rides a rocket, mouth open, hoping to get families in to see his 3-D Dickens. When Slim Pickens did something similar in Dr. Strangelove the phallic nature of the joke was obvious.
Maybe we’re just really sophisticated now.
-Pops Corn
FYI: Antichrist is playing at the IFC Center – 323 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY – Map
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