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Antichrist

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Cert: 18

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Dir: Lars von Trier. Cast: Charlotte Gainsbourg, Willem Dafoe

 

Description: A husband and his younger wife are engaged in lovemaking, oblivious to the actions of the baby son, who climbs out of his cot, opens the child safety gate and falls out of an open window to his death. The devastated couple seeks refuge in a remote woodland cabin where the spirits of the forest have a strange effect on the wife, culminating in a shocking act of self-harm.

Country: DEN/GER/FR/SWE/ITA/POL. 2009. 108mins

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Antichrist is shockingly bad

 

Nature lovers: Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg go back to their roots

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I’ve only ever won a bet once. It was at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000, and I was drinking wine outside some hotel with a rather energetic British producer of independent films. Other people were there, including the writer Peter Bradshaw and the actor Jared Leto, who looked, as he has always looked, like a person on the absolute brink of fame.

I said to the producer that Lars Von Trier would win the Palme d’Or for his singalong-a-sadness flick, Dancer in the Dark. Peter rolled his eyes in contemplation of the unthinkable: he wasn’t entirely hedging his bets, and later described the film as “one of the worst things in the history of the world”. The producer put £100 on the table and said it was impossible and I should accept the bet. I picked up the money, put it in my pocket, and said I would return it, doubled, if the film didn’t win the prize. The next day I spent it on presents.

Now, this would be a happy summer story if it wasn’t for one thing: Lars Von Trier’s films are hardly ever good and, indeed, more often than not they are so terrible you want to hide from them.

Let me say at the outset that this new one, Antichrist, is a pretentious little abomination. Entirely hopped up on its own spurious emotions, fully entangled in pop psychoanalytical garbage and manic depressive urges, the film would be shocking if it wasn’t so boring.

Art is only ever shameful when it isn’t really art, and Antichrist is hopelessly in love with its own deformity. It wants to shock you, but, more than that, it wants to show you all of its fabulous Danish contempt. This would be fine if Antichrist was searching, funny, camp, or beautiful — but it’s none of these things. It would like to be about sex and power and loss — big human things with long shadows — but what we get instead is a nasty, facile exhibition of one man’s fantasies about himself and his talent.

It opens with a slow-motion, poetical vision of a little boy falling to his death from a high window. It is snowing and his parents are having sex. When asked on the radio why he tried to make the opening so beautiful — it is completely out of kilter with the visual style of the film — Von Trier laughed and said he was ashamed, and that he only did it to make sure he got funding for his next piece of “masturbation”. Very good, Lars. Like, honk honk. (You are funny man with dark heart, no?)

Anyhow, we go from this lovely depiction of a child’s death to an account of the grieving couple, He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who are feeling guilty but also a bit horny. Next minute they are heading off to their cabin in the woods — Eden (oh, please) — to disintegrate and do bad stuff to each other.

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If the film wasn’t so persistently highly-strung and self-important, you might be able to enjoy some parts of it as a kind of send-up of horror film clichés, but that’s not possible: Von Trier finds all these clichés to be shining with relevance.

In the cabin, it goes from embarrassment to embarrassment, both in visual and plot terms. The film is like automatic writing or the scribblings of Nijinsky — easy to mistake for the workings of a genius but actually just the sad, metronomic impulses of a person in pain.

Von Trier has said openly that he made this film in a dire state of depression. I am sorry for him. But I’m afraid he risks reproducing his symptoms in his audience, a possibility he clearly enjoys rather too much.

By the time He and She begin their horrible, now-famous mutilations — his cock gets mangled, her clitoris gets clipped, and that’s just the foreplay — you begin to wonder if it’s ever very interesting to watch a director having a nervous breakdown. The images onscreen are neither here nor there — prosthetics, of course — but what does matter, as never before, even in a Dogme film, is the film-maker’s fixation on brutality.

I would be one of the last people to argue against difficulty in the movies — indeed, if modern cinema lacks anything, I’d say it is a questing avant-garde spirit. Yet one should see clearly the difference between a surrealist masterpiece — Buñuel’s An Andalusian Dog, for instance, which opens with an eyeball being slit — and the rancid small beans being served up by Von Trier.

What the film lacks is a real sense of bravery. He and She are exactly as you might expect in a European art film: cold and confused, deeply unpleasant, their minds not ringing with intelligence but seething with quotes. They live in some mysterious place where nothing human quite gets through: this is called being deep, and Von Trier falls for it like a spotty film student. In the end, the film can expose you to nothing about life, nothing about film, while telling you more than you ever wanted to know about the director’s malicious vanity.

Bad films are ten a penny. My theory is we should avoid, where possible, giving them the full treatment, and sidestep their bid for attention. But some bad films are quite momentous in their badness: they tell a story of self-deception and ugliness that should cause lovers of film now and then to stop and gaze. But, even so, if I were you, I would probably choose to take other people’s word for the badness of Antichrist. The only thing it has going for it is the end credits.

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