A ***1/2 out of **** review from Michael Phillips in the CHICAGO TRIBUNE...
Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist” has among its cast of characters a deer, seen briefly picking at its own dangling innards, foreshadowing some rough human behavior to come. Also there is a fox who speaks at one point. “Chaos reigns,” it says to the character played by Willem Dafoe.
I’m inclined to agree with a colleague who told me he could swing with “Antichrist” when it was simply unstable but couldn’t go with it when it turned insane. It’s a useful distinction. And yet the first hour of von Trier’s willful provocation — dedicated to Andrei Tarkovsky and freely sampling the rapturous imagery of Tarkovsky’s 1976 World War II reverie “The Mirror” — is pretty stunning. It dissects a psyche unraveling and a marriage, shrouded by tragic loss, being torn apart.
I suppose from one angle “Antichrist” is the most sadistic battle-of-the-sexes comedy ever made. The later, grindhouse-horror sequences include the use of stunt genitalia of both varieties. In the scene destined to mark this “unreasonable” (von Trier’s own description) experiment forever, the character played by Charlotte Gainsbourg performs an act of self-mutilation far beyond the usual weightless “Hostel” and “Saw” routine, precisely because the violence is self-directed. The more literal and preposterously vicious the on-screen violence, the less powerful, paradoxically, “Antichrist” becomes. Yet Gainsbourg is remarkable in the role of a woman whose young son dies in a horrible accident and who, we learn, has picked the wrong subject for her thesis. Dafoe plays her husband and therapist, as bad an idea as that sounds.
They retreat to their cabin in the woods, and there “Antichrist” turns into a Bosch painting, with suggestions of Munch’s “The Scream.” (The cinematography, disturbingly gorgeous in its color and black-and-white sequences, is by Anthony Dod Mantle.) The summer before, the woman and her son repaired to the same cabin so she could finish her thesis on witchcraft and violence against women through the ages. “Nature is Satan’s church,” says She. And service is about to begin.
Unlike “Dogville” or “Manderlay,” von Trier’s consciously theatrical studies in despair, “Antichrist” may be objectionable in a hundred different ways, but it is undeniable and cinematic in a hundred others. Its mixture of tones and genres risks complete disruption every second. (Von Trier’s atypical comedy, “The Boss of It All” was a wonderfully steely variation on “The Office.”) Certainly, the writer-director-fantasist takes the easy way out as he molds the Gainsbourg character into a harpy bent on destroying her oppressor. Certainly it’s barking mad. “You have to have the courage to stay in the situation that frightens you,” Dafoe’s He says to Gainsbourg's She at one point. Von Trier did exactly that, and he got some amazing work out of two exceptionally brave actors. And the film will, in its way, endure.
Posts: 27231 | 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.
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.
Bitch!
Or in this case you have decided you agree with him on a film you have not seen.
You could just as easily have decided you agree with the negative opinions of A.O. Scott, Owen Gleiberman or Todd McCarthy but being a past Von Trier fan you did not choose to align yourself that way.
Posts: 27231 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
Originally posted by pacinofan: A negative review from THE NEW YORK TIMES...
In Satan’s Church, an Eden Besieged
By A. O. SCOTT Published: October 23, 2009
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.
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.”
The problem is that they are often dumb ideas.
I agree with this assessment.
Posts: 13945 | Location: canada | Registered: December 22, 2005
What's a film festival without a scandal? When Lars von Trier's Antichrist debuted at the Cannes film festival it prompted boos, cheers, derisive laughter, and angry complaints that the Danish provocateur (Dancer in the Dark, Dogville) had really gone too far this time. Von Trier, mixing horror-movie conventions with art-film angst, assaulted the audience with hard-to-watch depictions of genital mutilation, bloody orgasms, and a heroine cutting off her clitoris with scissors.
Antichrist was but the latest in a long, long line of shock-tactic art films that follow a principal enunciated by Baudelaire and Rimbaud in the late 19th century: épater le bourgeois. This cinematic tradition can be traced back at least as far as 1929, when Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí began their surrealist classic Un Chien Andalou with a depiction of a man slicing a woman's eyeball open.
Buñuel and Dalí, like von Trier, delighted in shocking their audiences, yanking them out of their safety zones, upending their complacency—subversive goals that, 80 years later, every "transgressive" auteur still aspires to. The shock-art film—which typically involves some previously unexplored combo of sex and violence—has become a convention unto itself. Every few years, film festivals are (predictably) rocked and socked by some new affront against good taste: there was the protracted rape scene in Gaspar Noé's Irréversible; the teenage sex, drugs, and AIDS in Larry Clark and Harmony Korine's Kids; the full frontal sex in Catherine Breillat's Romance; the nudity and cannibalism in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. And these came decades after Pier Paolo Pasolini's horrific torture-porn Salò or the sex and castration that climaxed Nagisa Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses. Plus ça change …
In the age of Saw IV, Internet pornography, and unending real-life reports of torture and terrorism, aren't these bad-boy outrages looking a little tired? The shock of the new, after all, is now an old idea. But does it still carry a punch? It's not that we've become inured—you'd have to be half dead not to shudder at von Trier's grisly visions. But the artist's assumption that depicting these violations will open our eyes to mankind's vile nature—a lesson that can be learned almost daily on the front page of a newspaper—often seems smug and vainglorious, a clichéd subversion. Shock is too easy a shortcut to significance.
Also, the art film has been ghettoized as audiences have fragmented into niche markets. The very notion of what a movie audience is has changed: how do you arouse a public when many are no longer watching movies publicly, but sitting at home in front of their entertainment centers? It's a powerful feeling to share an audience's collective gasp, such as the one elicited by a startling suicide in Michael Haneke's Caché. That can't be duplicated in solitude. But increasingly rare is the breakthrough movie, such as a Blue Velvet or a Brokeback Mountain, that reaches a mass audience. These days we get our culture jolts in daily, bite-size potions on YouTube or Facebook, a kind of viral fast-food diet of scandal, easily digested and quickly forgotten.
In the '60s and '70s, when film was at the center of the cultural revolution, filmmakers seemed to have paradigm-shifting powers: a Godard or an Antonioni or a Fellini, by inventing a new cinematic language, altered both the ways movies were made around the world and the way we perceived the world. Filmmakers had the advantage of being part of a culture war—they had an enemy to attack: the establishment. Movies such as The Battle of Algiers or Godard's Weekend felt dangerous. Has any movie since those days seriously ruffled bourgeois feathers the way rap music did in its early years, before it was assimilated into the mainstream?
Today, to make a dent, filmmakers who want to shake up the status quo—and get themselves noticed—have to market themselves like products, something that von Trier grasped from the start. Years ago, when his Zentropa failed to win a top prize in Cannes, he grabbed headlines by dismissing the jury chairman, Roman Polanski, as "a midget." Like Dalí before him, von Trier is a showman, burnishing his (aging) enfant terrible image with quotable outrages. In Cannes he pronounced himself "the greatest director in the world," a remark calculated to rile the press, which dutifully rose to the bait. The American Harmony Korine, whose envelope-pushing movie Trash Humpers debuted at the New York Film Festival alongside Antichrist, plays the same game differently: his persona (which you can see on his Letterman appearance on YouTube) is somewhere between mumbling space cadet and idiot savant.
Korine's bizarre, nonnarrative Trash Humpers isn't easy to classify, or to watch. Shot in the crudest video, it purports to be a "found object"—the discarded home movies of a gaggle of deformed trailer-trash degenerates. This circle of small-town cretins and peeping Toms, whose faces look disfigured by fire, spend their time smashing furniture, dragging dolls from the back of their bikes as they cackle obscenely, having sex with obese hookers, and, yes, humping both trash containers and trees. These grotesques are, in fact, actors—Harmony and wife Rachel Korine among others—wearing fright masks. While it's a relief to discover that none of it is real, you may wonder what the point is of this creepy—and sometimes creepily funny—freak show. Is it a sendup of outsider art, an experimental Halloween masquerade, a vision of antisocial behavior at its most extreme? I couldn't recommend this movie to any but diehard Korine fans, yet as eager as I was for the movie to be over, its dirty rummage-sale images won't go away. Trash Humpers leaves the residue of an authentic nightmare. You'll want to shower afterward.
Antichrist is as artfully crafted as Trash Humpers is deliberately artless. Its admirers find it a profound cry of anguish, a piercing exploration of grief, pain, and despair (as its first three chapters are titled). Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg play He and She, a married couple who retreat to a cabin in the woods (Eden, they call it) in the aftermath of a tragedy that has left them bereft and at each other's throats: their child fell out of a window to his death as they were making love. He's a shrink, arrogantly playing doctor to his wife, convinced that she must confront her worst fears to exorcise her demons of guilt. The rational man will soon get his comeuppance, as von Trier's horror story shifts gears from psychological realism to surreal mystical hysteria—talking foxes, visions of writhing corpses, and the wife's transformation from grieving mother to a psychotic witch avenging centuries of violence against women.
Though it's hard to deny the fierce purity of Gainsbourg's performance, Antichrist plays like an incoherent mix of Gothic horror claptrap and Bergmanesque power struggle. I was more bored and puzzled than shattered and provoked. Perhaps if I hadn't seen Gérard Depardieu take an electric saw to his member in Marco Ferreri's far more resonant The Last Woman in 1976, I might think von Trier was traversing brave new territory.
Who will go to these movies? The irony is that the audience these directors want to challenge and shock is a relatively small, self-selected bunch of cinéastes who faithfully attend the latest von Trier and Haneke movies, well versed in the cinema of outrage. This isn't 1913, when the bourgeois audience rioted at the premiere of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. Even in '29, Buñuel and Dalí found it hard to get a rise out of their supposed antagonists: as the story goes, the two Spaniards arrived at the theater where Un Chien Andalou was premiered armed with rocks to protect themselves against the angry mobs. The rocks never came out of their pockets: the audience (to their disappointment?) rather liked what they saw.
Posts: 27231 | 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.
Bitch!
Or in this case you have decided you agree with him on a film you have not seen.
You could just as easily have decided you agree with the negative opinions of A.O. Scott, Owen Gleiberman or Todd McCarthy but being a past Von Trier fan you did not choose to align yourself that way.
What I meant is, Morgenstern's not a prude, tut-tutting throughout his review, like some of those posted here, and some of the posters here.
Originally posted by R2684: This is one of the worst movies I have ever seen and I am no Lars von Trier hater. It is miserable, meaningless and sadistic.(It's also hugely and undisguisedly misogynistic - women will hate, hate, hate this movie.) I also don't understand why Charlotte Gainsbourg received the Cannes prize for this performance - unless the jury confused running around and screaming like a banshee with acting. Which people often do.
My prediction - there will be a morbid curiosity which will bring lots of people into the theaters (like it did me) and then most will leave and wish they could punch LvT in the face.
Just give me a chance. I have been wanting to punch Lars Von Trier for a long, long time.
OH I get your (continuing) animosity now.
Glad I'm on the other side.
PS: Don't worry, I will nominate your original post for the "Gold Derby Wall of Shame" Awards.
I may or may not like it though I will admit the odds are against it since I am not a fan of Von Trier or his oeuvre. Still, every film, performance, what have you is another chance for success or failure. I do not hold past films/performance against someone or in their favor. Which is why despite my general affection for the Coen Bros. "Burn After Reading" was one of my least favorite films last year ("A Serious Man" on the other hand is my favorite film of 2009) and even though I call Meryl Streep my favorite actress I did not give her extra points when I saw "Doubt" and found her a complete phoney baloney. I am having a harder time thinking of a director/actor I generally dislike suddenly impressing me but I am sure it will come to me.
In the Von Trier case I loved the first film I saw from him, "Zentropa", as a film student but he wasn't sexually humiliating any women in that one which helps.
This message has been edited. Last edited by: pacinofan,
Posts: 27231 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
As I've said, for me it was Burn After Reading, which I surprisingly liked; I found Prairie Home Companion more than tolerable and for once totally unsour for Altman; I went from a real dislike for Kubrick to loving Full Metal Jacket, and have since reassessed many of his earlier films.
Originally posted by seanflynn: As I've said, for me it was Burn After Reading, which I surprisingly liked; I found Prairie Home Companion more than tolerable and for once totally unsour for Altman; I went from a real dislike for Kubrick to loving Full Metal Jacket, and have since reassessed many of his earlier films.
In general I find John Sayles films visually incompetent and overly talky/preachy but there are some I like a lot ("Matewan", "Lone Star" and "Limbo") and one I loved ("The Secret of Roan Inish"). It helps that "Roan Inish" is his most visually impressive film. I still do not feel that is an example of someone I hated suddenly surprising me since the good films are scattered throughout his long career.
I find Oliver Stone films boorish, long-winded, bombastic and completely lacking in subtlety, both in the dialogue and mise-en-scene, though a few work very well. "JFK" is visually quite something despite being crazy as a sh!t-house rat. "Platoon" remains very effective despite some serious script deficiencies.
I feel the same way about Spike Lee as I do Oliver Stone but still loved "Do the Right Thing" and "Malcolm X"... well until that self-righteous, overly worshipful doc that ends the film after it had been pretty even handed for three hours.
This message has been edited. Last edited by: pacinofan,
Posts: 27231 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
I am a fan of John Sayles. Very much so. His films are beautiful, and whimsical. Some of his films are better than others, and I havent loved everything he's done.
I wondered why all of a sudden, the relentless trashing of Stanley Kubrick stopped. Full Metal Jacket, is one of my favorite 'war' films. He was truly wonderful.
I am loathe to trash directors per se, or actors, with a broad stroke. But I imagine that Von Trier has a humungous portrait of himself, up on his wall. Probably several of them. Perhaps he may have one where, he is masturbating, hung in his dining room to amuse himself while he eats.
Posts: 13945 | Location: canada | Registered: December 22, 2005
Kubrick generated a lot of negative reaction because of what a lot of people - including myself much of the time - felt was his total misanthropy and the lack of human sympathy amid all the technical brilliance of his work. (The joke was that the only character with any human characteristics in 2001 was Hal; but perhaps that was the point).
I still am all over the place with him - I no longer hate A Clockwork Orange (I saw that on its day of release), I am a big fan of Barry Lyndon, like I said Full Metal Jacket seems to be close to a masterpiece. I still regret that he spawned a generation of directors who copied his misanthropy and soullessness - Mike Nichols, Robert Altman, the Coens most of the time - without having remotely the same amount of talent (although the Coens at least are good filmmakers).
Eyes Wide Shut - sorry, clueless what that was supposed to be about.
His wife and his daughters vigorously defended him, and convincingly. They didnt think he had a misogynistic bone in his body. Nor do I see any clear evidence of this in any of his films. I recall your saying that many times, and my disagreeing with you. Eyes Wide Shut is hard to appreciate. But he put his soul into that film, and expected his stars to do the same. The praise they left for him as a man, was good to see. And there was also quite a bit of talk about how the film was edited, and the final product not being what he intended. He was visionary, imo. I wish he was still around, making films.
Posts: 13945 | Location: canada | Registered: December 22, 2005
I never said misogynistic; misanthropy is disdain of humans individually and in general. I find it widespread in his work.
But as I said, he was more than that, and did interesting things with it. And he grew considerably as a visual filmmaker in his later years.
Anyway, for me he is the clear case of I director I thought wasn't good at 18 who I now respect and sometimes love; Altman is one who I at 18-19 thought was great and now dislike. So it's best to keep an open mind and be prepared to adjust.
This message has been edited. Last edited by: seanflynn,
Originally posted by babypook: I am a fan of John Sayles. Very much so. His films are beautiful, and whimsical. Some of his films are better than others, and I havent loved everything he's done.
I wondered why all of a sudden, the relentless trashing of Stanley Kubrick stopped. Full Metal Jacket, is one of my favorite 'war' films. He was truly wonderful.
I am loathe to trash directors per se, or actors, with a broad stroke. But I imagine that Von Trier has a humungous portrait of himself, up on his wall. Probably several of them. Perhaps he may have one where, he is masturbating, hung in his dining room to amuse himself while he eats.
hahahaaaaa
Posts: 118 | Location: Canada | Registered: July 11, 2009
Originally posted by seanflynn: I never said misogynistic; misanthropy is disdain of humans individually and in general. I find it widespread in his work.
But as I said, he was more than that, and did interesting things with it. And he grew considerably as a visual filmmaker in his later years.
Anyway, for me he is the clear case of I director I thought wasn't good at 18 who I now respect and sometimes love; Altman is one who I at 18-19 thought was great and now dislike. So it's best to keep an open mind and be prepared to adjust.
Lol. I know what a misanthrope is. If pointing out man's anthropocentrism is misanthropic, he certainly had a lot of friends.
Posts: 13945 | Location: canada | Registered: December 22, 2005
Originally posted by babypook: But I imagine that Von Trier has a humungous portrait of himself, up on his wall. Probably several of them. Perhaps he may have one where, he is masturbating, hung in his dining room to amuse himself while he eats.
Yeah, it was featured in Architectural Digest's annual "Hollywood" issue this year.
(Right next to the rare peep at Tarantino's S&M dungeon LOL!)
Actually that was one of the Wachowski bros (the one who supposedly was going to be transgendered, but that might have been a hoax). His wife and he have an open dom/sub relationship (he's the sub).
Originally posted by seanflynn: Actually that was one of the Wachowski bros (the one who supposedly was going to be transgendered, but that might have been a hoax). His wife and he have an open dom/sub relationship (he's the sub).
Why do we know this?
Why do celebrities feel we need to know these kinds of details about them?
Originally posted by seanflynn: Actually that was one of the Wachowski bros (the one who supposedly was going to be transgendered, but that might have been a hoax). His wife and he have an open dom/sub relationship (he's the sub).
Why do we know this?
Why do celebrities feel we need to know these kinds of details about them?
It's not just celebrities. Regular joe's seem to like to spread the word on their personal lives to. Some people just feel the need to share.... even if we don't want them to!
Posts: 118 | Location: Canada | Registered: July 11, 2009
