She digs He out of a tomb in "Antichrist."

(Lars von Trier, 2009)

February 7, 2010

by Joel Crary

“Antichrist” is an unpleasant viewing experience, and yet it’s so unapologetically itself that its integrity is difficult to doubt. Some will regard it as a triumph of neo-feminist filmmaking, others as a poisonous, misogynist tract. Writer/director Lars von Trier doesn’t make the distinction easy. His characters, nameless (credited as He and She), are emblematic of Adam and Eve, yet the Eden they inhabit is a dark, postlapsarian perversion, their actions within it an abomination against God and each other.

The film opens with a disturbing yet beautiful prologue, a metaphor for the Fall of Man that plays out entirely in black and white under a Handel score. We see married couple He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) having sex in their apartment shower. Their unwatched young son lowers himself from his crib, opens a window, takes a step out and tumbles to his death. All the while, snow drops gracefully from the sky and rivulets from the showerhead collect in the crevices of bent flesh. Von Trier draws our attention to falling objects, all occurring in slow motion, as though time can do nothing to stop it.

Continuing von Trier’s penchant for chapter segmentation, “Antichrist” is divided into parts (devoted to therapeutic stages of Grief, Pain, and Despair, and one to the Three Beggars) before its epilogue. She enters a deep depression after her son’s death, but ceases antidepressant medication at the request of He, a therapist who encourages her to meet every emotion head on. He contends that only exposure therapy will help the mind combat its illnesses and restore itself. She’s fears lie at Eden, a cabin in the woods where she spent the previous summer working on a thesis, her son never far out of reach. The two sojourn back to Eden, where the ground burns and nature seems always poised to infect rather than cure.

The film supplies a bevy of clues and motifs, collecting them into a metaphorical whole that represents a paradise utterly twisted in upon itself. Precipitation continues to occur in the form of acorns falling on the cabin roof and a hailstorm that signals Satan’s presence. Animals make foreboding appearances as the Three Beggars, including a doe giving birth to the carcass of a fawn, a fox eating away at its own entrails, and an alarmist crow. There is only death in this Eden, a Satanic inversion of that described in Genesis, where human nature results in entrapment and death rather than expulsion and procreation.

She recalls hearing a child’s cry that permeated Eden in the midst of her work, signaling eternal suffering. Her work involves an examination of 16th century women persecuted as witches, facts and artistic renderings of which she keeps in a book titled “Gynocide.” She is a victim of likewise persecution, suffering under the so-called “rational” process of a husband who exerts professional control over her emotions out of gendered jealousy. Her diversions to sex seem tied inextricably with loss, until the guilt runs so deep that only self-mutilation will absolve it.

It is apparent in every frame that Dafoe and Gainsbourg’s trust for von Trier runs deep. The actors are shot predominantly in close-up, and von Trier makes cuts liberally to ensure that his script is delivered just so, pulling the faces of Dafoe and Gainsbourg in and out of focus, adding shots that detail how each actor’s body looks as they swallow, breathe, blink and fornicate. In a film in which physical reactions are kept far and away from the rationality of the mind, these actors transcend their bodies, illuminating the material, bringing it to a level of horrifying symbolism.

A few too many indulgences carve deeply at “Antichrist”’s roots, mostly unneeded camera effects that bend and twist the Eden woods as though von Trier didn’t trust himself enough to communicate his ideas with static shots alone. A talking fox informs us that “chaos reigns,” and no matter how pregnant with foreshadowing, no matter how deeply inflected, no director alive could pull off such a convention with a straight face. But the rest of the film is staged tightly, with haunting, removed slow motion sequences that build tension and create nightmarish relationships between image and narration.

The film’s central performances are the bravest of recent memory. Usually that’s code for a popular actor’s willingness to reveal his or her genitalia to the camera, but Dafoe and Gainsbourg give themselves over completely, offering shocking, violent sequences of raw sexuality. Though Gainsbourg was honoured as Best Actress at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, the film received an “anti-award” for its perceived misogynist content. While I understand the view, I cannot share it; in his world of mirrors, opposites and inversions, von Trier supplies too many suggestions that insinuate the contrary. Even a female gender symbol in place of the second “T” in “Antichrist” stands as an indictment of the powerlessness of women to act against a system of belief that disables them as saviours.

And this: He limps his way to the top of a hill, scrounging on the garden floor of Eden for sustenance. He looks back at the way he came, and suddenly there appears a throng of figures, all making their way up the hill in turn. As they move closer, we can make out that they are the persecuted women of She’s research, their faces mysteriously absent. They pass He on the hill as he looks on in bewilderment. Like many of von Trier’s creations, we are unsure of their corporeality. But they are there nonetheless, pushing forward together on instinct, out of Eden and into the world.

“Antichrist” is showing at the Bytowne Cinema through Tuesday, February 9th.