Antichrist (2009, Lars von Trier)
Somewhere in this film is a thesis, an absolute point to it that defines exactly what it is that director Lars von Trier was hinting at when he made this maddeningly terrifying, wholly frustrating, perhaps-misogynistic film. That does not mean that this is not a good film, or one that should be ignored: just don't expect any easy answers from it. Don't expect a “point”. Don't expect to be told how to react to it. But do expect to react.
The story is simple enough: a married couple (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) are vigorously fucking in their home late at night when their young son, Nick, a toddler, wanders out of his crib and falls out of a window, dying. Charlotte (I shall use the actor's names, since the characters have no names in the film) reacts horrendously to the loss, eventually being hospitalized and undergoing various psychiatric treatments. Her condition degrades to the point where she is unable to sleep, suffers from convulsions, hysteria, and self-harming behaviors. Her husband, a psychiatrist of some sort, decides to help her by taking her to the one place she reveals that she is most scared of: their cabin in the woods, Eden. There, in the middle of nature, alone, Charlotte's psyche degrades further until she becomes murderously psychotic.
Dafoe gives one of his typically subdued performances, playing the husband character as being clueless to his wife's distress, unable to cope with her emotions once is is alerted to her predicament, and once he realizes her emotional distress, remains distant in an attempt to objectively “cure” her with his own unique brand of therapy. Charlotte, on the other hand, provides a much more powerful performance. The physical and emotional duress with which von Trier challenges her is staggering. Seeing her in this film and in her performance as Stephanie in The Science Of Sleep is like witnessing day and the blackest night. It's clear that she worked much, much harder than Mr. Dafoe in her performance (not to demean his work), but I'd never seen anything quite like her work. The fragility, emotional instability, and overall degradation of not only her mind and body (man...what she does to her body), but also her soul is apparent. Nothing she does on screen is fake or insincere, and by the last act she becomes a scary visage of rage and violence, and it's astonishing to see that evolution throughout the film.
The actual story sounds very much like a horror film (which this should be considered: this is cerebral horror as well as visual, visceral horror). It is deceptively simple. The underlying themes and imagery of the actual film, though, are anything but. Von Trier (a director called by some, prior to this film, a misogynist) imbues the film with a nearly unbearable sense of dread that actualizes itself in various different ways: the sound of wind blowing because the growl of a hell-beast; acorns falling on the roof of the cabin become unnerving signals of approaching doom; the ground undulates and vibrates, the contours distorting at the edges (achieved through some impressive camera effects). The sound design itself was a marvel, immediately reminiscent of David Lynch’s foundry and industrial sound design that opened and permeated throughout Eraserhead. Here, von Trier uses sound to accentuate the aggression and ultimate violence by creating a cacophony of grating, rumbling, growling sounds, punctuated every so often with dreamlike instances of silence and steamy sighs.
Cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (who helped shape the frentic, kinetic look of last year's Slumdog Millionaire) provides some of the most beautiful imagery put to celluloid all year (honestly, regardless of the content, this film looks absolutely beautiful; each frame deserves to be framed on a wall). Mantle's restrained camera work and defused colors provide a memorable palette of visual expression to most of the film, but in other instances (such as the “dream” sequences and opening sequence), he shoots some of the most beautiful black-and-white sequences of the past decade, combining the two-toned images with a cranked-up camera to slow down time in the midst of -in the case of the opening sequence- vigorous, manic, almost hysterical fucking, counterpointed by a child's curious wandering to a window and eventual death. The snow that falls out the window falls one flake at a time; the water that flows off the bodies of the two lovers glistens and slides one drop at a time. Time slows down in this opening sequence, the only moment of true happiness for any of the characters that literally crashes at the crescendo of Lascia ch'io pianga from 'Rinaldo', which is the only sound played through the sequence.
However, all technicalities aside, this film is about one central theme: gynocide. Mankind’s eternal war against women. Before even walking into the theatre, I had read several reviews (most notably A.O Scott's over at The New York Times, and Devin Faraci's dissemination over at CHUD.com) and ever-present in each was the question of mysogony. Von Trier, with Antichrist, was waging his own war of sorts against the fairer sex, so they seemed to see. While Mr. Scott abhorred the film, seeing nothing of redeeming value within it, Mr. Faraci remarked how much he'd liked the film...though he shouldn't have. I too am in that same league, for several reasons.
The film posits many positions and questions, and none of them are easy to answer or even face, and some (and I feel I'm going to get a lot of flak for even saying this) I feel that, as a man, I am unable to ask without inviting glares. The first, perhaps the most important question I faced while watching the film is: “What is misogyny? What is the nature of it?” That's not to suggest that I don't know what misogyny is, but to what degree does misogyny extend? For example, in the film, Charlotte is pushed by Willem to come to terms with their son's death by using unconventional means, by facing her fears and confronting, without any real psychological protection, the very places that pain her and remind her of her son and that she fears most. To simplify the result, Charlotte snaps and attacks Willem (viciously...I'll get to that later), and tries to kill him before mutilating herself and then being killed herself by her husband. All of this is violence on many levels, and while it is easy to point at the son's death as the impetus of all the insanity, the film posits that perhaps the violence unleashed in the final act (which begins with the death of the son a year prior in the film's chronology) is in fact the end result of a long tragedy for the characters.
Now, the tone of this film is very “horror”: this can be described as a horror film (one that works more effectively than the current “torture porn” or “CW bullshit” that seem to define the horror genre of late). The typical horror film convention is that there is a killer (often male) terrorizing victims (often female). Here, the roles are reversed, with the female providing the threat and the male defending himself (or, if you want to really get into the structure, this film is like an inverse The Shining, where Wendy goes insane and tries to kill Jack). Charlotte's character is a writer who had spent a summer with her son working on her thesis, a book called Gynocide that worked as a chronicle of hatred and violence towards women, and she began to realize that throughout the countless centuries where women were victimized, women are just as capable of perpetrating violence and hatred as men. Therein lies the single issue I had not only with the film, but also with those who viewed the film and saw it as nothing but misogynistic hatred: are women not capable of being just as evil and vile and viciously violent as men? Are women not equal to men in terms of evil? Is it not misogynistic itself to deny women their violence, if that is what they choose?
If Willem Dafoe had been the character to go crazy and try to kill his wife, that would follow the normal horror film contention and there would be little issue with the film simply because it is conforming to the norm of the genre; however, when it is a woman being evil, a cry of “misogynist” is immediately cried out. To me, that is hypocrisy. I viewed the film as two characters interacting in a fucked-up way through a fucked-up situation and reaching fucked-up conclusions; rarely upon first viewing do I see anything more than characters. However, I feel that if there is a character of color, or of a handicap or, in this case, a woman, then that character represents to the public every single one of that denomination, and the public perception of that group hinges on how fair or balanced or benign a character within that represented group is portrayed. To me, again, that's hypocrisy.
This is a film about misogyny that is interpreted as being misogynistic due to its addressing that topic. The imagery and themes (the Three Fates; a tree reminiscent of fallopian tubes---under which Willem Dafoe hides himself, literally crawling back into the womb which, at that point in the story, betrays him to the violence of woman---, and Charlotte's degrading into an hysterical state) repeatedly highlight the film's exploration of men's attitudes in confronting, controlling, and ultimately trivializing the female psyche.
Nature, too, becomes a spectre of violence. Personified in three female animals that rove the woods outside the cabin and in the sudden horrific screams that Charlotte imagines hearing while with her son, nature is out to destroy the fragile stability of the human mind (and, once Charlotte refuses to resist any more, becomes exclusively the bane of men's “rational” minds). The Three Fates, the sisters, are personified in the guises of a dead crow brought back to life, a doe giving birth to a stillborn deer, and (the movie's most iconic image), a self-cannibalizing fox that speaks (literally)the undeniable message of nature to Dafoe: “Chaos reigns”.
What does all of this mean (and there is so, so much more...remember that I wrote of Charlotte's character becoming “hysterical”? Well, I meant that in the strictly Freudian sense. This film has a lot going on with it. I've maybe discussed half of it's themes, and haven't even touched on the psycho-sexual dynamics of the final acts of genital violence present in the final act)? To me, I'll put it like this: the film is about the condemnation of life. Charlotte's character rages against a world that took her child, but, in becoming one with nature, she realizes that giving birth is itself an act of death (something she herself discusses with Dafoe during the course of the film). In forming a new life, one forces that life to struggle, grow old, and eventually die. Childbirth, it seems, is prescribing a life sentence to someone. That is what I walked away with from this film. Dafoe's character cannot understand this fact, instead thinking that logic and rationality can cure all the ills of the world, when in fact the ills are much more cerebral and eternal and subjective: Charlotte's character, like any mother, knows the power of holding and giving life within her. Men can never understand that (and I'm talking the traditional definition of men here). As powerful an experience being a father is, for a mother it is much, much more powerful. It has to be. There is no way it can't be (look at it this way: a mother always knows that the child she's carrying is hers). Nature is life giving birth to life that will eventually die itself. The screams that Charlotte's character hears (both literal child's screams, and the “screams” of the acorns on the roof of their cabin at night) is nature itself, lamenting the lives lost through the act of birth, of the paradoxical destructive act of creation.
This is a hard, difficult film to sit through, and you'll be hard-pressed to sit down and watch it a second time. But if you do see it (and I cannot recommend it enough, but not without its warnings), be ready for lengthy discussions to follow. Fuck the people to condemn it as being purely about hating women, because it is not a film propagating that mentality. It is a film that strives to open a discussion about what it means to be rational, emotional, hysterical, alone, unloved, distant, violent, a man, a woman, a parent, depressed...it is a movie about ideas. Do they all coheir evenly? No. But whether you're swept up in the absolutely stunning cinematography, watching through fingers (as I was), or realizing just how little you knew about misogyny itself, you'll walk out of the theatre wanting to talk. In this case, as the fox says, chaos does reign. But out of the rubble of this film, hopefully enlightenment will arise.
http://tobatheinfilmicwaters.com/2009/08/01/interview-lars-von-triers-misogyny-consultant/
http://tobatheinfilmicwaters.com/2009/06/09/review-antichrist/
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/lars-von-trier-women-and-me-1763851.html
CHUD's own Devin Faraci
New York Times' A.O. Scott
P.S.- I hate the Dogme 95 school of filmmaking von Trier developed...
