VIFF 2009 | Antichrist at Schema : more than ethnic

VIFF 2009 | Antichrist

Antichrist
Denmark/Sweden/France/Italy, 2009, 109min
DIR: Lars von Trier

Disturbing! Abysmal! Trash! The New Film by Lars Von Trier.

On opening night of the film festival, tension ran through the crowd as the most disturbing scene in Lars Von Trier's new film Antichrist began to unspool. Fists started to clench, legs were crossed, and, at its height, two powerful reactions were clearly heard - a terrible scream and laughter. Antichrist is a film that provokes little beyond repulsion or humourous disbelief and, in that way, it is a strange and awful failure. To its credit, this fact remains uncertain until about the mid-way mark when a fox bares it's teeth at Willem Dafoe and declares, "Chaos reigns!"

From that nadir of silly, it was lost.

Set in an unrecognizable Washington state (it was filmed in Denmark and Germany), the film can be read as a pounding (also brutal, relentless, and heavy-handed) assault on feminism and American reinvention. At one point Dafoe's character shares some very American-sounding pop psychology: "If you can conceive and believe, you can achieve." But in this film brimming with paranoid anxiety, medieval symbols and superstitions, von Trier of ancient Europe says this isn't so.

Antichrist focuses on the relationship between an unnamed couple, "She" (of vaguely European origins) and her American therapist husband. With the woman mired in medicated and destructive grief after the death of her young son, the couple head to a cabin in the woods called Eden for her rehabilitation. This allows von Trier to regressively re-frame the woman's despair as a force of nature and chaotic energy, alluded to as a fox, a deer, and a zombie crow. She is simply a conduit for nature itself. Her husband's (and the audience's) inability to understand her depth is immaterial; von Trier puts forward the medieval argument that nothing can be done since, at heart, von Trier argues, she is evil. Her evil plays out in awful and ridiculous ways as when she bolts a planer into her husband's leg. The longer he has to drag himself along, the more this becomes a gag prop.

It is a disturbing portrait of a woman because it is so strongly argued. It's as if von Trier is trying to shut down forty years of feminism. Fortunately, feminism has reinvented a lot of the world outside the cinema. Antichrist is all the more ridiculous for not being able to see that. It's scary too.

Thur. Oct. 1, 9:45pm, Granville Theatre
Sat. Oct. 3, 11:00am, Granville Theatre

Schema Magazine's coverage of VIFF 2009 is sponsored by the Toronto Reel Asian Film Festival