Antichrist

Antichrist

The term antichrist is often used to signify “the opposite of Christ.” In its original Greek, however, it means “against Christ.” It’s a good place to start thinking about Lars von Trier’s new film. The main character in “Antichrist” is a human being rather than a supernatural entity who loses our shared moral values. He doesn’t have anything good in him and personifies evil; nevertheless, this reflects what he is like as opposed to his theological identity.

Willem Dafoe plays this man called He as a grave driven tortured individual. The movie begins with He and his wife She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) making love passionately an act of complete goodness. In the next room their baby son starts crawling around exploring falls out window dies. This action itself neutral but it gives rise rest film which labels itself three chapters: Grief Pain Despair.

We must assume that He and She are on psychological knife edges already. She has been doing some research into witchcraft which leads her question whether or not women might be inherently evil something that could make her feel less valuable herself. However, he represents controlling dominance when traumatized by the death I think wants punish woman gave birth to their child.

Guilt requires atonement therefore their first stage should have been left alone instead trying cure. They blame themselves for having sex while they should have been watching over infant she mentally punishes herself reasons may not be aware of drives deal with guilt as problem lecturing using calm patient detached psychobabble it’s her grief fault he will condemn her through life.

This causes pain most immediately when insists upon going dark woods remote cabin that has always terrified. The cabin is called Eden; take from that what you will. They’ve eaten fruit already so never can it for them again.

Now psychic pains counseling combined with move into forest are joined by natures own inflicted hurts upon them these woods are populated by strange animals which appear normal such as deer fox crow but possessed and unnatural neither refuge sought within their increasingly outside wildness inflicting one another ways unimaginable shocking intimate.

These sections are sometimes called “torture porn.” They’re definitely sadomasochistic, but whether they constitute pornography or not is simply a matter of opinion. Is there even one person in the audience who will find these scenes arousing? I can’t imagine it. These are extreme acts intended to be so; von Trier has always been a provocateur and now he wants to provoke and upset his audience more than any other serious filmmaker more even than Bunuel and Herzog. He wants to do it with sex, pain, boredom, theology and stylistic experiments that are just plain bizarre. And why not? If nothing else we know we’re at least watching a film exactly as he wanted us to see it, without being watered down by some studio executive afraid of controversy.

I think I know what’s in it for von Trier, but what’s in it for me? Mostly what I responded to were the performances. Feature films may be fiction but they’re also documentaries showing actors in front of a camera. Both Dafoe and Gainsbourg have shown themselves to be risk takers you must be if you work with von Trier but this is extraordinary even for them: The ways they’re required to act in this movie are beyond the imagination.

They don’t hesitate; more importantly they persuade. Who can say what von Trier meant? His explanations have been maddeningly vague. The actors take the words and actions at face value and invest them with all the conviction they can muster. Therefore He and She escape from under his theoretical control; in effect they get away from him (and from us) by acting on their own behalf.

We really do not know much about acting at all. In an interview last week I asked Dafoe what discussions he had with Gainsbourg before their difficult scenes together, when terrible psychological cruelties are inflicted on her. He said they talked very little: “We had great intimacy on the set but the truth is we barely knew each other. We kissed in front of the camera the first time, we got naked for the first time with the camera rolling. This is pure pretending. Since our intimacy only exists before the camera, it makes it more potent for us.”

So it is a documentary in one sense. What does it document? The courage of actors, for one thing. The realization of images, for another. And personally, our fear that evil exists in the world, that men are capable of infinite cruelty and that (as it does in this film) it may result in wiping out human hope. Despair is stage three.

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