I was reading Tony Comstock‘s post “Do you want to be put in the same category as Alfred Kinsey, Max Hardcore, or Catherine Briellat?â€: The limits of sexual expression in an algorithmic world.” in which he reported that, Matinee, a film that depicts actual sexual intercourse between actors was, essentially, refused entry at an Australian Film Festival, while Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist was screened. Actually, Comstock’s discusses designations and legal classification in a very erudite fashion, but despite his excellent examination of the subject, I was left reminded of the Lars Von Trier film and my reaction to it. I’ve never posted a film review here, and I guess it says something about Antichrist that I felt compelled to write one.
But before I get into the review, I’d like to do some distinguishing. Firstly, as you might have noticed from my stories, I am not the fan of healthy representations of sex that Tony Comstock is. I respect him immensely for what he does. I just don’t find nice, healthy, uncomplicated sex all that intellectually stimulating – so I rarely write about it.
Secondly, I would like to challenge what is commonly seen as the hard line in the sand between actors who ‘pretend to have sex’ and actors who actually have sex in front of a camera. Even dialing it back to simply on-screen kissing… a hot kiss is a hot kiss. It’s either hot or it’s not. And if it was an ‘acted’ kiss – it’s just not hot and humans over the age of consent can usually tell quite instinctively. Similarly, I really fail to see much difference between two actors who are lying on a bed naked, humping away in ‘pretend sex’ and those who go for actual penetration. For one thing, it depreciates the fine art of frottage, in my view, which is just as significant a sex act as any other. If all that distinguishes something being classified as ‘porn’ is the act of penetration, then…well… it’s just silly, as far as I’m concerned and we’re all being hideous hypocrites. If the determining factor is orgasm, then a good percentage of all intercourse had by women is, in fact, not sex, since many women fail to orgasm during penetrative sex.
Okay, onto the film itself. In the interest of not reinventing the wheel, here’s the synopsis:
A couple lose their young son when he falls out the window while they have sex in the other room. The mother’s grief consigns her to hospital, but her therapist husband brings her home intent on treating her depression himself. To confront her fears they go to stay at their remote cabin in the woods, “Eden”, where something untold happened the previous summer. Told in four chapters with a prologue and epilogue, the film details acts of lustful cruelty as the man and woman unfold the darker side of nature outside and within. Written by Peter Brandt Nielsen
Antichrist is undeniably a piece of art in terms of some of DOP. There is outstanding use of planes of focus, slow motion, etc. It also has a brilliant musical score. Moreover the acting (Willem Dafoe plays the husband and Charlotte Gainsbourg plays the wife) is superb.
The premise of the story is also extremely compelling. While the husband and wife are lustfully fucking, their child falls out a window. And this begins a journey into grief, guilt, shame and pretty well every other primal human emotion you can think of. It’s Euripides meets Shakespeare as far as weighty musings on the basic and universal human condition.
It would have been so good to see it examined intelligently. But that would be too modernist for Lars Von Trier. Instead, he opts for what appears to be a multi-threaded, hazy, mythology laden descent into a place of almost complete misogyny and anti-humanism. Eschewing any attempt to really understand either of the characters, he gifts the wife with an inexplicably voracious and masochistic sex drive and the husband with criminally irresponsible arrogance.
What follows is scene after scene of some of the worst onscreen violence – sexual and otherwise – I’ve ever seen.
And if – if – these scenes did anything to inform the discussion, shed light on the events or insight into the people involved, I would have forgiven him. But they don’t. They are the way Von Trier manages to abrogate himself from any responsibility to actually be a good storyteller. His trick is to sicken his viewers so much, they don’t care to hear the end of the story.
This is irresponsible storytelling at its most calculated. And why does he do this? Perhaps because he is neither smart enough, nor brave enough to make an attempt at answering the questions posed by the story’s premise.
Did you see it? What did you think?
I saw bits of it, and thought almost the same as you. I find films like this unbearably pretentious, even though I often like a bit of pretention. And I find it unbearable with a film like this, because it’s just torture porn, dressed in arthouse clothing. It’s no better than Rob Zombie or Eli Roth’s films, but it tricks the viewer into watching it with promises of interesting questions and dynamics, and leaving behind nothing but the director’s own obvious hang-ups, spattered with gore and violence and grimness that he must clearly love as gleefully and stupidly as Eli Roth.
Even sadder, Eli Roth is the better man. At least he’s honest about his aims.
Before this:
“His trick is to sicken his viewers so much, they don’t care to hear the end of the story.”
there was this:
“[W]hilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.”
But the salient difference is that Joyce really was a good storyteller.
My only comment regarding this film, five minutes and gone.
Overall I really do love Lars Von Trier’s work; to me he tells incredibly tragic stories, but they all seem very human, beautifully honest. However I do think Anti-Christ was a slightly different case. I found the first three parts really beautiful and I thought the dialogue and performances were just outstanding. But when it really began to descend into violence (without much clear reasoning) I just felt uncomfortable. Had there been good reason for what he showed onscreen towards the end, I might have felt more compassion and pain for the characters. But there wasn’t. Furthermore, it felt like it suddenly became a slasher movie in that kind of “where is the killer going to appear from next” way. Frankly I expect more from Von Trier than dressed-up torture porn.
On the other hand, I am glad that there are directors out there challenging the film industry and their audiences. So much of the stuff we see now is just mass produced hollywood bullshit, and I am genuinely relieved that we live in a World where films like Anti-Christ are still being made.
I would probably watch it again, just because it had such a strong effect on me (and maybe I have some slightly masochistic tendencies showing through there), but I’m not sure I’ll ever make it all the way to the end again.
Beautiful, then disturbing and ultimately disappointingly effecting.
(Very late comment, but I wasn’t reading your blog in September, and I had to throw in my two cents.)