Originally posted by Scout: I saw it two months ago and had mixed feelings about it. The acting was good, especially Gainsbourg, but it was absolutely disgusting when she cut off her clitoris. If I was her I would never agree to play the scenes that she had to played. They were degrading for a woman.
Originally posted by Pucifer: Perhaps it was just a fake clitoris?
Of course it was fake, but the sex scene scenes and especially a masturbation scenes seemed real. I'm all for real acting, but sometimes it's too much.
Originally posted by seanflynn: Dogville for me, albeit with content misgivings, is just about the most thrilling piece of mise en scene I've seen in a film this decade. It confirmed for me von Trier (mad) genius. It was one of the fastest moving films I've ever seen.
I like Dancer in the Dark quite a bit, particularly Bjork's great performance.
I agree on both counts. Dogville is certainly a favorite film of mine this decade.
On Dancer in the Dark, the scene with Bjork singing "These are a few of my Favorite Things", in confinement, is just P.E.R.F.E.C.T.
Posts: 5462 | Location: Kirkland, WA | Registered: March 13, 2006
I thought 'Dogville' was too in love with it's whole 'Our Town' gone vicious theme, while the constant hardships dumped on Bjork in 'Dancer in the Dark' became tiresome.
I feel that Lars von Trier has a theme -- take an innocent woman, make her as pure as freshly driven snow and then proceed to put her through the worst of every possible situation, with an emphasis on sexual abuse.
Originally posted by OnMyBirthday: I didn't like either one.
I thought 'Dogville' was too in love with it's whole 'Our Town' gone vicious theme, while the constant hardships dumped on Bjork in 'Dancer in the Dark' became tiresome.
I feel that Lars von Trier has a theme -- take an innocent woman, make her as pure as freshly driven snow and then proceed to put her through the worst of every possible situation, with an emphasis on sexual abuse.
I think he needs to find a new story arc.
I totally agree.
That being said I have no doubt I will see "Antichrist" On Demand mostly for Charlotte Gainsbourg. Also, because I sometimes like to challenge myself to viewing shocking material... not that I usually end up enjoying it. Also, because I must therefore be a glutton for punishment.
Posts: 27161 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
Originally posted by Scout: I saw it two months ago and had mixed feelings about it. The acting was good, especially Gainsbourg, but it was absolutely disgusting when she cut off her clitoris. If I was her I would never agree to play the scenes that she had to played. They were degrading for a woman.
Perhaps it was just a fake clitoris?
I think Scout hates seeing a clitoris bite the dust.
Originally posted by OnMyBirthday: I didn't like either one.
I thought 'Dogville' was too in love with it's whole 'Our Town' gone vicious theme, while the constant hardships dumped on Bjork in 'Dancer in the Dark' became tiresome.
I feel that Lars von Trier has a theme -- take an innocent woman, make her as pure as freshly driven snow and then proceed to put her through the worst of every possible situation, with an emphasis on sexual abuse.
I think he needs to find a new story arc.
I totally agree.
That being said I have no doubt I will see "Antichrist" On Demand mostly for Charlotte Gainsbourg. Also, because I sometimes like to challenge myself to viewing shocking material... not that I usually end up enjoying it. Also, because I must therefore be a glutton for punishment.
That's what has started to bother me about Von Trier (in addition to the raging misogyny in his films). What he's putting up on screen has begun to fail to shock.
In the age of 'Saw' and 'Hostel,' perhaps it is tough to "shock," but going into a Von Trier film, knowing all the horrific things he has done to his female characters in the past, I have come to expect debasement by him.
I'm at the point where I'm not even shocked anymore. And at that point, all I can really end up being, in his films, is bored.
In a way, though, I almost feel like he tells the tales of women that you hardly EVER hear about. I compare it almost to the way in which in The Odyssey, the maids' deaths are covered in just a few lines or so.
What Lars does is take a character, like one of the maids, and tells her story.
As a person that always wonders about the backstory of EVERY character, Lars is a director I like very much. Not to say that there aren't characters in his films that don't seem very important, but I imagine that Lars thinks very carefully of all people in his films and could make a movie about every single one of them.
Posts: 5462 | Location: Kirkland, WA | Registered: March 13, 2006
Originally posted by OnMyBirthday: I think that's a very astute observation, and as film-goer, I felt that very strongly in 'Breaking the Waves.'
While I didn't enjoy 'Dancing in the Dark,' I agree -- it was well-characterized.
Nope. Not willing to give him that much credit... especially as I often find the villains in his pieces very one-dimensional... actually the heroines/victims are often fairly one dimensional too. I think he is just a sicko who likes pulling the wings off butterflies and salting slugs even if he knows where to put the camera to make it look interesting.
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Posts: 27161 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
Part of what drives me to make that statement was the genuine affection I felt for Siobhan Fallon's prison guard character.
Perhaps she's just a very strong actress, but there was a lot more there in terms of what I saw on the screen than what that character could have been in 'Dancer in the Dark.'
Originally posted by puxzkkx: I don't think its a fantastic film. But I think the marked difference between the response to the film from critics and that from bloggers, net cineastes and film fans I know shows that it isn't going to go down in history as just some awful shock flick.
I don't think it is a masterpiece, at all. But it is the kind of film that I could see legitimately gaining canonical status among film writers and cinephiles in the next few decades.
And for the record, it is far less misogynistic than, say, Breaking the Waves. And it seems to me that a LOT of people are judging this film without having seen it. Not to mention I saw it with my mother, a dyed-in-the-wool feminist, and she loved it. But maybe that's because she knows how to read and appreciate a film.
Also, I'm more likely to trust the opinion of people who are ready and willing to discuss the film in depth, devote time and thought to it, than the opinion of critics who, while renowned and qualified, have a very limited period of time between watching the film, writing their review of it and sending it to print. I'd bet you that quite a few of the trades critics who gave Antichrist pans when they first saw it may have quite different opinions now.
After all, it is certainly the kind of film that takes a bit of time and work to wrap your head around.
For the record, I gave it a 'B' on a scale of 'F' to 'A+'. At the end of a given year, I only consider films graded 'B+' and above as eligible for my personal Best Picture award. I think many elements of the film are breathtaking, genius, stunning. But I also think a roughly equal amount is completely unsuccessful, ideas that look better in ones' head or on the page than on the screen. It is a very, very flawed film. But it isn't a film that can be easily boxed into tidy labels and categories either.
First, your comments make it seem as if film critics are not themselves cineastes which is largely incorrect. Many film critics are also film professors or have similar jobs like running film societies for museums or directing film festivals.
Second, since this film was seen by many critics at film festivals quite a while ago those that had seen it months ago have had plenty of opportunity to ponder the film and come to a well-formed opinion.
As you often do when you find your opinion outside of critical consensus you have tried to come up with self-serving reasons as to why you are correct and the bulk of the professional critics are wrong. You even state/imagine that most critics will be reassessing their opinions even though such a statement is based on nothing but your own taste. Just accept the fact that you are in the critical minority on this film. There is nothing wrong with that. You believe what you believe but there is no reason to say the professional critics are not also secure in their opinions and that those opinions are less than concrete compared to your own.
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Posts: 27161 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
I know a lot of film critics, some of my best best friends are film critics, most of them go to film festivals, and it is the rarest of exceptions for them to think substantially differently about a film upon later reflection or further viewing than when they first write about it, often shortly after seeing it. That statement has no basis in reality.
Todd McCarthy of Variety has been a von Trier hater for some time. He chooses who reviews films for the publication; he should have let someone else do it.
I have no idea what I am going to think of Antichrist, apart that I expect it to be in some ways brilliant and beyond most films made today, but also disturbing and at times annoying. But he is a huge talent.
Women: intrinsically evil or tragically misunderstood? If this strikes you as a fruitful topic of discussion, then you may wish to see — or perhaps I should say endure — Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist,” a film that has already set off carefully orchestrated frissons of disturbance at film festivals around the world. It starts with a slow-motion, black-and-white sequence, scored to a Handel aria, of graphic sex (with a snippet of hard core thrown in just for fun) and climaxes with two vivid scenes of genital mutilation.
Mr. von Trier has said that making the movie helped him overcome a crippling depression. I’m glad he feels better. He has certainly lost none of the impish, assaultive sensationalism that has made him both a darling and a scapegoat of film critics. But the formal rigor and intellectual brio that made his best films — “Breaking the Waves” and “Dogville” — as hard to dismiss as they were easy to loathe seems to have abandoned him. The scandal of “Antichrist” is not that it is grisly or upsetting but that it is so ponderous, so conceptually thin and so dull.
The story is simple enough, and arises from a precipitating calamity laid out on the very first page of “Melodrama for Dummies”: the death of a child. During the sexual ecstasy of the opening scene, as a nameless couple played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg grapple on nearly every piece of furniture and appliance in their apartment, their son, a toddler, climbs from his crib and makes his way to an open window. He tumbles out, along with his teddy bear, at what seems to be precisely the moment of his mother’s orgasm.
The rest of “Antichrist,” divided into chapters and shot in weird, pulsating, muted digital color by Anthony Dod Mantle (“Slumdog Millionaire”), explores the aftermath of this fatal incident, and expands on its implicit linking of female sexuality and death. The mother is mad with grief and guilt, and Ms. Gainsbourg’s anguished, naked (literally and otherwise) performance is, at least in the film’s first half, its only genuinely harrowing aspect. Following in the footsteps of Emily Watson in “Breaking the Waves,” Bjork in “Dancer in the Dark” and Nicole Kidman in “Dogville,” she allows herself to be pushed and provoked toward brave and extraordinary feats of acting in a dubious cause.
Mr. Dafoe, playing her husband, is less demonstrative. A psychologist of some kind, he decides to take over his wife’s treatment, weaning her off medication and subjecting her to his own methodology, which includes drawing a triangle on a piece of paper. The apex represents the thing she fears most. Is it her husband? Is it nature? Is it the isolated forest cabin they call Eden?
That sinister, sylvan place is where they go to work things out, amid a storm of falling acorns and a riot of metaphors and curious optical effects. “Antichrist” certainly looks and sounds troubling, with landscapes that warp, buckle and undulate and an aural design that turns puffs of wind into satanic murmurs. Occasionally a grotesque animatronic animal — including a talking fox that has already gathered a cult following in cinephile circles — shows up to add an extra touch of Guignol.
Ms. Gainsbourg’s character calls nature “Satan’s church,” one of the film’s many nods in the direction of the horror genre. Another is her research into the history of witchcraft, in particular the murderous suppression of pagan religious practices associated with women in early modern Europe. The fruit of her work is a scrapbook of old woodcuts and paintings titled “Gynocide,” which her husband discovers in Eden’s attic.
Such pseudo-scholarship is of course a hallmark of the modern horror movie, though usually (as in “Paranormal Activity”) it is conducted via Internet search. Mr. Von Trier is in some ways a traditionalist, though his depictions of bodily harm inflicted by homely instruments (pliers, scissors, a fireplace log) are avant-garde enough to startle devotees of the “Saw” franchise. Unlike the makers of that persistently popular festival of pain, he is also a bit of a snob, a filmmaker who undermines his pulpy instincts with high-flown, vaguely political ideas.
The problem is that they are often dumb ideas. There has already been some debate among critics about whether “Antichrist” is grossly misogynistic or slyly feminist, an argument ultimately as fruitless as the question posed by the movie about the nature of women (see above). That talking fox has given the movie a handy catchphrase — “Chaos reigns!” — but a more apt one is delivered by Ms. Gainsbourg among bouts of howling, sobbing and penis smashing: “None of this is any use at all.”
Posts: 27161 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
A positive review (I guess?) from Joe Morgenstern in THE WALL STREET JOURNAL...
'Antichrist'
Opening "Antichrist" this close to Halloween does Lars von Trier's latest film a disservice. This isn't a pretend horror flick, with violence you can shrug off or laugh off. It's the real thing, and I'll try to do the service of emphasizing—without specifying, so read on—the intensity of the horror, which begins as a couple's emotional burden after the death of their child, and the extent of the violence, which is sexual, psychosexual, symbolic, graphic, pornographic, misogynistic (though also mutual, as well as self-inflicted), and deeply, deeply disturbing. It's a two-character piece, unless you count a talking fox. The husband, an emotionally remote therapist, is played by Willem Dafoe. The wife, a writer working on a book called "Gynocide," is played by Charlotte Gainsbourg. Most of the action takes place in or near a cabin in the woods where the couple has gone in search of spiritual peace. To say they don't find it is the understatement of the movie year.
My first—and then frequent—instinct was the emotional equivalent of duck-and-cover: I didn't want to deal with the couple's shared madness, the movie's provocative looniness or Mr. von Trier's bleak notions about the ties that bind us one to another, to religious belief, and to a Mother Nature that he depicts as calmly and implacably malign. But both actors have given themselves over to the filmmaker's vision with performances that had me feeling like Malcolm McDowell in "A Clockwork Orange," horrified yet unable to look away. And Anthony Dod Mantle, the cinematographer who shot "Slumdog Millionaire," has created a succession of somber images (in delicately controlled black-and-white) that refuse to loosen their grip on my memory. By turns repellent, powerful and ludicrous, "Antichrist" piles horror on horror with pitiless passion.
Posts: 27161 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
Originally posted by Pucifer: Morgenstern's good. And I guess I was too hard on him for his review of "Capitalism: A Love Story," which was after all very positive for the WSJ...
You say that now. Let's wait until the next time you decide that you disagree with him on some movie you have not seen.
Posts: 27161 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
A ***1/2 out of **** review from V.A. Musetto in THE NEW YORK POST...
Lars von Trier might not be, as he famously boasted in Cannes, "the best director in the world." But, as witnessed by his "Antichrist," he certainly is one of them.
For those who don't recall, "Antichrist" scandalized Cannes, which isn't easily scandalized, with its explicit sexual violence.
I finally got to see the film this week, and I went expecting to be shocked -- and so I wasn't.
Not bothered by the shocking elements -- bloody masturbation, a self-inflicted clitoridectomy -- I was free to concentrate on the strong points of von Trier's film.
First and foremost has to be the surreal, fairy-tale-like cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle, who also lensed "Slumdog Millionaire."
Then there are the brave performances by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg (she won Cannes' best-actress laurel).
Very few actors would have the courage to allow von Trier to put them through what Dafoe and Gainsbourg experienced in the name of art.
They play a Seattle couple -- identified only as He and She -- whose young son, Nic, tumbles to his death from an apartment window as his parents make love.
(The tragedy brilliantly unfolds in slow-motion black and white to the sounds of a Handel aria.)
Switching into color, "Antichrist" tracks the grieving couple's trip to Eden, an isolated cabin deep in the woods where He, a psychoanalyst, hopes to treat his wife's deep depression.
Psychoanalysis quickly turns to S&M sex play. She bolts a millstone through his leg. He escapes, but she finds him and attempts to bury him alive.
The next morning, she unearths him and they return to the cabin, where the film's most infamous scene transpires. (I heard gasps coming from the back of the screening room at that point.)
Von Trier loves to provoke, as we've seen from such previous films as "Breaking the Waves""The Idiots" and the musical "Dancer in the Dark," with Bjork and Catherine Deneuve.
In fact, von Trier would sink into a depression as deep as She's were his films to be embraced by mainstream audiences, a segment of the population for which he has nothing but disdain.
Please don't take anything I've said to indicate that "Antichrist" isn't difficult to watch.
It most certainly is, but as somebody (the Marquis de Sade, perhaps) once said: No pain, no gain.
Posts: 27161 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
