Antichrist

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.

Below are some leading critiques of the film, one by the "misogyny consultant".

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...

Slumdog Millionaire

Slumdog Millionaire:


If it weren't for my girlfriend, I would not have seen this movie in theatres and would have either waited for it to come to DVD, or watched in online (and missed the entire experience of actually going to the theatre, and supporting the previously lamented Ridgefield Park Theatre).
I'd read and heard a significant amount about this film, all of it pretty much unanimously positive. After seeing the film, I can say that none of it is exagerrated nor undeserved. This is one of the best films I've since last year, which itself was damn near chock-full of great movies (for the fanboy and cineaste in me).
The story is as such: Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) lands on the Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, and after answering the first few easy questions and becomes the most unlikely contestant ever: a homeless orphan from the slums of Mumbai facing the opportunity of winning 20,000,000 rupees. Suspiscions run high from the host of the show (played with considerable range by Bollywood superstar Anil Kappor) and the police (who believe Jamal is cheating, and they will do anything to find out how he is getting the answers). But Jamal jsut knows the answers. He's not a genuis, and he's not cheating. He's lived the life and through his experiences knows the answers.
It is during his interrogation at the police station that we learn about Jamal's life living in the slums of Mumbai, and how each of the questions asked during the course of the show relate to that life: the murder of his mother; meeting his favorite actor, Amitabh Bachchan; playing with his friends and brother on the runways of airports; swiping food from those better off than he; being manipulated by (and finally escaping) the gangster Maman (Ankur Vikal); watching his brother Salim grow accustomed to life on the street and eventually (and heartbreakingly) pushing Jamal away; meeting, saving, escaping with, and eventually falling in love with Latika (Freida Pinto, as the oldest incarnation of the character, oozing a beauty and elegance I feared was lost in film); getting his job at a telecommunications company, and finally landing on the game show and inspiring all those living in the slums, as well as the nation of India.
I've never seen a Bollywood film (my friend Rob has seen a few...I need to get his advice as to where to start), but if this film is any indication then I shouldn't have too much of a problem following (although I also heard from my girlfriend that they're nearly 6 hours long...meh). The film is vibrant with a life and energy that I'd realized were missed from a majority of late-December releases (you know, the ones that just scream "Oscar!") That's not to say Slumdog didn't scream "Oscar" also, but it did so while also telling an engaging story, running the gamut of cinematic emotions, and pulsing with life; the "Oscar", if this movie was screaming such, was screamed like an afterthought, a gasp of breath in between frentic scenes.
Danny Boyle, a director I admired ever since I first saw Trainspotting back in high school (damn, was that really 5 years ago?), and known more recently for 28 Days Later, The Beach, A Life Less Ordinary, Sunshine, and Millions (among others) managed to surprise me. He allows his cinematographer, Anthony Dod Mantle, to create a colorful palette of imagery using a variety of techniques (more canted angles than I could count; exagerrated colors; a repetition of scenes and shots; non-intrusive handheld movement; extensive variety of depth-of-field, the list goes on and on). More prevalent are the themes that tie all these elements together: family; escape; truth; love; sacrifice; commitment and luck. It's not to say Boyle's flourishes are missing: there are clever uses and freeze frames and jump cuts (and a combination of the two teechniques that I don't think I've ever seen before), a savage, addictive soudntrack, lots of violence, a street savvy script that doesn't once sound contrived, and a Hindu god standing in a doorway (perhaps the second-best image in the entire movie).
Jamal and Salim's relationship reaches a few apexes, some which were entirely unexpected but none which felt hammy or insincere. When Jamal, after seeing his brother for the first time in years, says, "I can never forgive you", you feel the words. Salim's redemption, as symbolically important as the questions Jamal questions, is perfectly realized, and it is the only way he can ensure the happiness for Jamal and, also, Latika. Jamal's determintion borders on obsession, doing everything possible to get close to Latika; but after everything he's been through in his life, he has the right to hold onto something so dear as closely as he wants. Latika, on the hand, is almost always the victim in the story, and in one of the few scenes where she is proactive and is the only one who can help Jamal, she cannot even do that. That doesn't take anything away from Latika or Freida Pinto at all, oh no. Not every character needs to be proactive, because not everyone in life is proactive. But her lack of being able to take matters into her own hands bothered me some time after I saw the film and was able to think about it.
The cast does amazingly well in their roles. Dev Patel as the grown-up Jamal never once feels out of his element, imbuing Jamal with an innocence yet determination that immediately makes him the center of every scene (although there are a few scenes that are stolen if not by any incarnation of Salim, then by the beautiful cinematography). Freida Pinto is impossibly beautiful as Latika, an orphan who becomes Jamal's singular love and inspiration (it is for her that he competes on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?).
I might be (and probably am) mistaken when I present the opinion that this film is Danny Boyle's most alive film since Trainspotting almost 13 years ago. But whereas that film is almost irredeemably satirical and downright frightening, Slumdog Millionaire is organic, with a definite love for each and every character onscreen (Trainspotting, on the other hand, pushes its characters through gauntlets of abuse, both physical and emotional, and at least two of the characters seem to be unloved by the story). In a conversation about the film with a coworker, I was asked how I viewed the film when I saw it: what did I take away from it? What mood was I in? Was I supposed to take it seriously or just enjoy it? For those who ask those questions and plan to see it I'll let you know that the film pretty much tells you exactly how to view it once the end credits begin. If you stick around for those, you'll knwo what I mean.
On the other hand, antoher question I found myself answering was whether the film is successful (in the States, anyway) for being a Western film in what would otherwise be considered an exotic setting. The Who Wants To Be A Millionaire inclusion, plot point about English cricket players, and hip-hop heavy soundtrack (I will never be able to listen to "Paper Airplanes" by M.I.A. on its own terms ever again), it was feared, was shoehorned into the story to make it more relatable to Western audiences. The fact that most of the locations of the film are set in the slums of Mumbai has been criticized by Amitabh Bachchan at http://bigb.bigadda.com/, and also by social activist Nicholas Almeida, who apparently finds the term "slumdog", which writer Simon Beaufoy apparently made up, to be offensive to the residents of the slums of Mumbai; while Almeida wants to court-order the title be changed to something "less offensive" (whatever the fuck that means), Bachchan's argument seems to be that Western audiences would receive a negative view of what India is. It is not all slums and shoeless orphans. We know that. And yes, Mr. Bachchan, there are cities in Western countries that are just like that, that have worse slums and ghettos and poverty. And those parts of society are also illustrated in movies. Look at Night And The City, or pretty much any movie Scorsese made from 1968 to 1980. This is not a blatant attack on a country's image; it is a story that happens to be set in the slums of Mumbai from the 1980's to 2008. (To be fair, neither of these complaints are held nationwide by India, and Bachchan also commends the film, just with a nervousness that audiences will get the wrong impression.)
That rambling aside, hopefully Slumdog Millionaire will inspire audiences to rediscover Indian cinema, which is the most prolific film industry on the planet (I for one want to see The Story Of Apu now), or study Indian history. That might be pushing it, but maybe I'm wrong. But for a no-star, mostly-subtitled independent film to not only gain explosive popularity, but to also be critically acclaimed and the single film to beat for the Academy Awards, something must have been done right. This is a film vibrating with life, almost ripping from the movie screen and grabbing you by the arm and reminding you why movies are even made.
If you haven't seen the film, do yourself a favor and do so. And stick through to the end credits. They're great.

If only I can get "Jai Ho" out of my head now...