Antichrist

Lars von Trier's latest, Antichrist, begins with a prologue shot in gorgeous black & white. Completely in slow motion, it is a graceful dance of death to Handel's "Lascia ch'io pianga". Willem Dafoe ("He") and Charlotte Gainsbourg ("She") are passionately making love as their son, Nic, is supposed to be sleeping in an adjacent room. However, as She is dying a little death, Nic dies the big one – he falls out of an open window.

With the prologue over, the grieving begins and in color, even if Anthony Dod Mantle's beautiful cinematography is drained of all but greens, browns, and greys. During the funeral procession, He cries as She collapses to ground. Fellow mourners quickly come to her aid but their faces are obscured as if a round pane of privacy glass were floating before each of them. She is admitted to the hospital but, after a month, He decides it is time for her to come home. Being a psychotherapist, He has decided to make his wife a patient despite this being a no-no in the profession. The scene in the hospital ends with the camera zooming in on the stems of flowers sitting in a vase. The water is green and murky and the zoom goes in extremely close, so much so that our POV is that of being in the water.

While She is obviously in severe distress, He seems oddly unaffected and detached as he engages her in therapy which involves trying to get his wife to confront her fears. Indeed, He speaks to Her in a very clinical manner. Her greatest dread seems to stem from a cabin in the woods owned by the couple with the iconic name Eden. And so they pack their bags and hop aboard a train.

We next see the couple hiking through the woods to Eden. At one point, they decide to rest and She avails herself of the opportunity to take a cat nap. He, on the other hand, wanders until he comes upon a doe. It turns around to reveal its stillborn fawn protruding from its hind quarters and walks away.



As the zoom on the flower stems presaged, the scenes at Eden not only take place in nature, but are about Nature. In addition to the doe, He encounters an auto-eviscerating fox who warns him, "Chaos reigns!", and his hand left dangling out a window during the night is found in the morning to be covered in white bugs which had gnawed their way into his flesh. If these weren't enough, the oak trees nearby have a preternaturally large number of acorns with which to pelt the roof of the cabin. Nature may be red in tooth and claw, but I don't think that Tennyson had quite this in mind.

She's state of mind deteriorates further but she does reveal something about her fear. She had brought Nic with her to Eden the previous year when she was preparing her thesis paper on gynocide. He finds some of the work she did in the attic and her writing becomes more childish and messy as it goes on until the pages are blank. She tells him, "Nature is Satan's church", which, I think, gives us insight into von Trier's imagery and that, after studying misogyny through the ages, she has come to believe that women are inherently evil. This notion proves to be a self-fulfilling prophecy as she attacks him and smashes his genitals shortly after attempting to mount him. With him unconscious, She proceeds to drill a hole in his leg into which she inserts the axle of a grinding wheel with the wheel still attached. He wakes up to find She gone and makes his escape to a foxhole at the base of an old, gnarled tree. Once She discovers he is gone, she frantically searches for him. She eventually finds him but is unable to pull him out so she digs a hole from above after having calmed down a bit. Having dragged him back to the cabin, She then gives penance by cutting off her clitoris.

Antichrist is the Book of Genesis recast and inverted. Nic's death is the fall from grace which precipitates the couple going to Eden. Eden is transmogrified from being a lush, verdant home that provides for Adam and Eve, to a dark, rainy landscape created by Satan from designs by Hieronymus Bosch that confronts She and He at every turn. Arguably, von Trier's treatment of She harkens back to the early Church fathers such as Aquinas and Tertullian who took Ecclesiastes to heart ("Sin began with a woman and thanks to her we all must die" and "And I find more bitter than death the woman".) She is often seen naked from the waist down and initiates sex in the time after Nic's death. It is at her feet that the animals seen around Eden congregate. Unlike He, She is unable to control her lust and in one scene retreats to the base of this Eden's Tree of Knowledge to masturbate.



She's sexuality is the core of her evil. When we see flashbacks to the couple making love as their son faces certain doom, we see She's face, we see her come to orgasm. The implication is that it is her lust which causes both of them to lose awareness of their toddler. After Nic's death, She's sexuality turns darker and violent. During a scene of sexual playfulness as She is beginning to move on from the grief stage, She bites her husband's nipple too hard and sours the mood. Subsequent intimacy is miles away from the tenderness of the prologue. Instead it generally involves She jumping atop her husband and progresses to the point of genital mutilation.

I take von Trier's treatment of She not so much as a reflection of any misogyny he may harbor but as part and parcel of dealing with the concept of evil through the lens of a Christian parable. You may think otherwise.

Moving away from the thematic, I will say that I loved the cinematography. Anthony Dod Mantle's work here is fantastic as we shift from the graceful black & white elegance of the prologue to the chapters presented in drab, dreary color. There is plenty of jittery camerawork and jump cuts to give a realistic documentary sense of unease to the proceedings but there are also ostentatious moments such as when the camera steadies and zooms in on the flower stems as I mentioned above which draw the viewer somewhere outside of the action.

Both Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg deserve credit for their acting here, especially Gainsbourg. Let us hope she's not a method actress because portraying someone at their wits' end can't be easy and trying to become that type of person must be even worse. I think she had to run through just about every human emotion here in addition to the screaming, crying, and nudity.

Antichrist is less a story than a series of impressions. It's not that the plot is inconsequential but what is more important is how the imagery, the music, and the metaphors hit you in the gut. The film is cerebral in one sense but more visceral in another. There is a brief shot of penetration during the prologue which really isn't necessary if all von Trier wanted to do was show how in love these two people are. Seeing them writhing around and to see her face are enough. But seeing genitalia is a move away from mere character development.

I think of Antichrist as a meditation on evil that is part psychological horror story and part adult fairy tale. (Of the old school where Sleeping Beauty is raped and Little Red Riding Hood is eaten.) But the genius of the movie is that you'll have to puzzle it all out for yourself.