The scandal-plagued release of Lars von Trier’s latest film inspired Jack Stevenson, American expat in Copenhagen, to take a deeper look at the film in a Danish context.
The duelling stereotypes about European art cinema and commercial (American) films have become so ingrained they’ve started to ossify into immovable clichés. The commercial Hollywood film, goes the wisdom, is superficial entertainment devoid of any depth or personal engagement while the European art film is pretentious claptrap fashioned by wildly self-absorbed film “artists.” The far too personal versus the far too impersonal. Now just when the ice was starting to crack and pundits were beginning to take a more nuanced view of the issues, Lars von Trier shows up at Cannes to blow life back into at least one of these clichés, declaring at the press conference that he didn’t make his new film Antichrist for critics or the public but for himself alone. He went on to declare that he was divinely chosen by God to make this film and that on top of it he was the best director on earth.
Admittedly it’s unclear how much of this the ever-ironic Dane really believes, and he had been egged on by a British journalist who, in the wake of a riotous press screening marked by both boos and cheers, angrily demanded that he explain and justify his film — surely a red flag to any self-respecting auteur. Finally there can be little doubt that his outburst was aimed to a large degree at Danish critics who had been bashing him since the release of his last movie.
Nonetheless, his above comments — along with cavalier dismissals of those who had been offended — and the film itself genuinely provoked just about everyone.
Some more viscerally than others. For some reason, at the premiere screening one or more of the viewers fainted and had to be carried into the lobby where space was cleared so they could get oxygen. This was “fantastic” publicity, declared von Trier’s long-time producer Peter Aalbæk Jensen, who was later compelled to deny that he had orchestrated the episode. (That a few unconscious customers could be a good thing was hardly a new discovery. Pumping noxious gas into theatres so patrons would faint and have to be carried out on stretchers was standard practise in American exploitation cinema of the 1940s and ’50s. Once photos of “shocked” customers flat on their backs hit the papers, the rest of the run would be a guaranteed sell-out.)
The thousand-strong army of writers who stayed to the end of the film fared only slightly better, according to Danish journalist Michael Bo, who wrote that after departing the theatre they “straggled through town torn between the desire to throw up and the necessity to drink to forget.” Antichrist remained hot topic number one throughout the rest of the festival. Every conversation seemed to be about it, every opinion seeming to spark heated counter arguments.
This harrowing tale of a married couple whose son accidentally plunges to his death from an open window ranks as von Trier’s bleakest and most transgressive effort to date and left lead actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, who plays the guilt-stricken mother, contemplating in darker moments whether her participation constituted “career-icide.” To the contrary; she would win the fest’s Best Actress award, but for stretches she was clearly at a loss of how to deal with the aftermath of making this movie. More at ease with his part in the film was Willem Dafoe, her coldly rational therapist husband who tries to coax her back to life in the densely wooded seclusion of their tumble-down cabin.
During the course of their encounter session, things take a disastrous turn as ominous portents of death and doom emerge from the hidden folds of the forest and the hidden folds of their minds. What boded to be a trite melodrama becomes an ambiguous psychological shadow play drawing on elements of mythology, history (the witchcraft persecutions) and deeply rooted marital issues. Stony realism mixes with horror movie stylizations while an otherwise barren soundtrack is studded with moments of classical as well as experimental music to further enhance the schizophrenic nature of the experience and position it outside any identifiable genre.
Neither Gainsbourg, Dafoe, nor von Trier himself claimed to know what the film was really about, and public opinion was sharply divided. To some, the psychology, incorporating aspects of Jung and mythology, was precisely and accurately worked out, while others clearly saw von Trier’s maddeningly teasing hand at play in the creation of meaningless riddles and transparent attempts to shock. That he could toy with such deeply disturbing emotions and employ such extreme imagery for apparently no reason offended many, and he further baited naysayers by happily admitting in press materials that the plot was paper thin and that he had indeed inserted certain scenes for no reason.
Released in Denmark on the heels of the Cannes premiere to exploit its scandalous reception, it became an instant hit, and Antichrist follow-up stories filled the papers. Hometown critics hailed their imperfect local hero for his “masterpiece” but oddly stopped short of calling it an actual movie.
This was a total turnaround for local critics who had almost in unison slammed his last film, the lightweight comedy The Boss of It All. This was not the kind of film they expected from him. He needed to be rapped on the knuckles and shown that he too could make a flop. His lesson in humility had been absorbed but at the cost of sparking or at least greatly aggravating a deep depression. For a while he was so despondent he was unable to work on any film projects and whiled away his days by fuddling about the Zenotropa Studio grounds with a model airplane. Their paychecks hanging in the balance, Zentropa employees looked on with plastic smiles.
Antichrist was in large part a therapeutic exercise designed to lift von Trier out of that depression, and a misshapen monster of a film was born. Fantastic! Danish reviewers were all back on board again. This was the kind of dark, unorthodox work expected from him, and in a broader sense it was also the kind of movie international critics expected from Scandinavian directors.
Reviewer Kim Skotte, of Denmark’s most influential broadsheet Politiken, proclaimed it a masterpiece almost solely because to his mind it eschewed the conventions of any known genre. Others hailed it as beyond brave, a film you couldn’t get out of your head, love it or hate it. What it actually meant was up to the viewer to decide. Never would the right of a film to mean nothing be so staunchly and eloquently defended. Only a couple of years prior, it was considered absurd when lead actress Laura Dern of David Lynch’s Inland Empire couldn’t fathom what her own film was about, but now with von Trier it was courageous.
This was sly revenge on the director’s part. In his view, Danish critics were an egotistical and self-righteous bunch whom he generally detested, and now they were so smitten and knocked off balance that they were advising readers to see his film more than once and to figure it out for themselves. The power to discover, to interpret and decide had been given back to the viewer. Lars von Trier: man of the people?
Antichrist’s open-ended nature tempts one to ascribe to it the qualities of an experimental film, which might also explain why many critics are so baffled and in some cases enraged; simply because at commercial feature-film showcases like Cannes they so rarely see true experimental films that demand a very different kind of engagement. Yet an experimental film is not merely one without an obvious moral or plot. It is, in its most successful forms, a work that offers viewers individual routes to greater realizations or emotional catharsis, the specific pathways varying according to a host of subjective and unquantifiable factors. The experimental film is not the destination but the ticket, and the journey to be taken depends on (and demands something from) the viewer.
Judging from his past record and own statements at Cannes, von Trier is hardly interested in the audience actively participating in his film. Sure, the Cannes audience participated, but that’s because the crowd was so fired with partisan fervour that it turned into open warfare as soon as the opening credits hit the screen. Yet outside the city limits of major festivals it’s a different affair, as attested by several young couples at a sparsely attended suburban multiplex screening outside Copenhagen (where this writer saw it) who were plunged into a frozen silence that lasted well out into the parking lot. I suspect this was indicative of people who see the film cold.
The true art film director cringes at accusations that he might be entertaining or catering to the audience. In its holiest and most rarefied of forms this kind of cinema is a manifestation of unbridled ego, and with Antichrist we are only allowed to go where this obsessively disciplined director deigns to take us. The destination is not open, and von Trier is no “man of the people.” This is a journey into self, and the more searingly personal the exploration the better. This is his universe we find ourselves in, governed by his rules of logic that at times can seem capricious. At one point in the film he even exercises the godlike power of creating a fake astrological constellation. His total lack of inhibition or humility in imagining, constructing and exploring these various worlds has always been his greatest strength — and some would say his greatest weakness.
If there is realism here, it springs from his time-tested technique of “tormenting” performances out of his actresses. In this he succeeds masterfully. In perhaps the most startling scene, a naked and entranced Gainsbourg leaves her husband to wander outside and lay in the soft mud at the base of a large tree where she begins to furiously masturbate. The scene is as genuine and sustained as it is disturbing and unerotic. These are the actions of a woman possessed or insane. It is the nexus between sex and death that resonates with an almost gothic sexual morbidity.
The essence of this extraordinary film is conveyed in these moments, which linger in the subconscious and hint at a deeper story. As a narrative drama it fails to engage, thanks not least to the lack of chemistry between Gainsbourg and Dafoe, whose relationship is fleshed out solely through banal, lifeless verbal exchanges. It’s hardly their fault; they clearly can’t relate their characters to anything in their own experience because they are body and soul wholly von Trier’s fabrications.
The making of Dogville suggests a precedent. At the same time as von Trier’s 2003 film was being shot, a director named Sammy Saif was shadowing the cast and crew, gathering material for a “making of” documentary entitled Dogville Confessions. He later elaborated on the experience in the Danish press:
I observed all these people who attempted to be a part of a bizarre idea that one man had gotten. It was an impossible idea for he explained almost nothing. The actors didn’t know what they should do. They didn’t know where their characters came from or where they were going. And that was enormously frustrating and made it difficult to meet the challenge. They became insecure and that also made them lonely. . . . I don’t believe any of them really understood anything about the film before they sat themselves down to watch the first rough edit. At a certain point people accepted the premise and chose to go along with him.
One might logically assume that von Trier’s preparations with Dafoe and Gainsbourg took something of the same form.
Antichrist is a slippery fish. It’s a horror but not a horror film. Despite scenes of brutal realism, it is not to be taken literally, and yet while it has dream-like sequences it is not a dream. It’s deadly serious but also an absurd joke. It’s all about cognitive therapy, which the director himself has reportedly undergone, but offers no answer other than the bromide that one must confront one’s fears. The gruesome history of women persecuted through the centuries (primarily for witchcraft) that haunts Gainsbourg is the crux of the film but is only given the most cursory treatment.
Much has been made of the fact that this is not a genre film, and yet stylistically and conceptually it fits neatly into the “Lars von Trier genre.” Like Dancer in the Dark, it is set in Washington State, and common to both pictures is the fact that the setting is superfluous. An escaping Nicole Kidman “melted” into the back of a truck via gradual superimposition in Dogville in the same manner that Gainsbourg melts into the grass here. As in Breaking the Waves, there is a fairytale ending that is audaciously von Trier and can be construed as both transcendental and preposterous.
And yet again, as noted, another actress is purportedly abused and tormented. This has predictably revived old charges that von Trier is a sadistic misogynist. Danish writer Elisabeth Møller Jensen argues in a Politiken editorial that the film is “cultural sexual harassment” and an anti-female “perversion.” The paper’s editor-in-chief, Tøger Seidenfaden, coincidentally a boyhood friend of von Trier’s (exemplifying how inbred Danish cultural life can be), fired back that the charges mystified him. To him it was anything but, and yet he conceded that both interpretations could be correct and that no one had sole possession of the truth about this film; no one was “right.”
Others, including prominent academic Peter Schepelern and filmmaker Annette K. Olsen, who directed the 2003 Dogme film In Your Hands, were more forthright in their defence. Both claimed he was merely exploring his feminine side. It was hardly a secret that he was more interested in the female character. Gainsbourg divulged as much in interviews. Her character is simply emotionally much deeper and more resonate than Dafoe’s, however paralysed by grief she is. He is a blank slate, his dialogue delivered in an eerily robotic cadence. As Olsen herself commented, it took her days to figure out whether he was sympathetic or unsympathetic. The wildly fluctuating manner in which Gainsbourg relates to Dafoe throughout the film purportedly speaks to an emotional dynamic in their relationship but more pointedly seems to reflect her own confusion about who he actually is. Probably the director himself never knew. One almost suspects her responses to him were intuitively made up scene for scene as her natural emotional reactions dictated. And since there are only two characters in the film, it makes for a very sparsely populated landscape if one of them is subtracted.
Conventional wisdom says that with Von Trier, European critics tend to be pro and American critics con. Possibly true in general, but the complaints differ on this one. If American writers tended to diss previous films like Dancer in the Dark for its improbable setting and Dogville for its perceived anti-Americanism, this time around the main beef seems to be the film’s art house pretensions and its refusal to speak to any specific audience — aesthetic issues that expose the old cleft between art house and American-centric commercial filmmaking. Variety, for example, refused to take it seriously, with critic Todd McCarthy declaring that von Trier had “cut a big fat art film fart.” Danish critics, however, brought up on art film excess like Yanks are raised on hamburgers, don’t even have this issue on their radar and chalked up Variety’s criticisms to the paper’s supposedly endemic antipathy to their local hero.
As Antichrist opened in European markets, it sowed discord between audiences, critics, and religious groups. It was controversial and it was hot and it sold tickets. In France, several Christian organizations joined to protest the decision to rate it 16-and-over. Yet their attempts to get it classified as pornography (18-and-over), by among other things filing a lawsuit against the French cultural minister, failed. Heated debate over the film unsettled the cafes and editorial pages across the land, recalling that other notorious Danish film — Häxan — which in 1926 drew 8,000 Catholic women to the gates of Notre Dame Cathedral in protest. Yes, Danish directors could still provoke French Catholics. In Poland, Christian organizations accused the state of supporting a “pornographic” film and launched a petition drive to stop screenings. Audiences thought otherwise, and its opening weekend grosses set a European record.
No one disputed that the film was shocking. In addition to Gainsbourg’s masturbation scene, there is a conventional penetration insert in an early shower sequence when the two make love. It shows a close-up of an erect penis entering an (almost unseen) vagina in slow motion and to classical music in an effort to dim the actual pornographic effect. Yet clearly more transgressive was a scene where Gainsbourg cuts her clitoris off with a pair of rusty scissors. There is also a sequence where she smashes her naked husband’s crotch with a fireplace log and then furiously hand-jobs him to a climax in which he ejaculates blood. Despite faked blood it all looked quite real due to the fact that the hand job was executed by porn actors (who also stood in for the shower scene) and was smoothly clipped into the sequence, making for a disturbing what-are-we-seeing moment. The clitoris cutting was in turn depicted via special effects but was no less troubling for it. Politiken ran a full-page exposé on the small Copenhagen FX lab that had accomplished this feat, illustrated with four pics of anatomically correct vaginas that would probably never be printed in a daily paper in any other country on earth. Another trick the company accomplished was to create a still-born foetus coming out the hind quarters of a deer that Dafoe spies in the forest to his deep dismay.
Variety would complain that “the blood-smeared sensationalism smothers what serious thoughts the script serves up in passing, just as the sexual interludes detract from the film by playing peek-a-boo and making you try to figure out what’s real and/or how it was faked.” Aside from the masturbation sequence, these “shock scenes” that would push the film deep into NC-17 territory in the States (US distrib has promised to released it uncut) could admittedly seem cynical, and — considering they were shot in a manner so that they could be deleted for more restrictive markets without disrupting the flow of the film — perhaps also, as Variety alludes, unnecessary. Their optional nature is obvious when a nude Gainsbourg saunters about unbloodied and apparently unaffected after her self-disfigurement, and when Dafoe awakens from his ordeal with just a few grunts and groans. With several stabs of a pair of scissors the pornographic elements could be dropped, reminding us what a premeditated proposition even “transgressive” commercial art house features can be. Were directors just braver back in the bad old ’70s? Compare Antichrist to the seminal pornographic art film classic of that decade, Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses. Here the porn couldn’t be edited out because it is an organic part of the work, permeating the very spirit of the film. The fractured and constructed Antichrist is certainly less an organic whole, but in spite of the many structural criticisms that can be levelled against it, it bewitches.
Von Trier has long promised and threatened to make a porn film (see Bright Lights issue # 43, “Lars von Trier: Pornographer?”) Had he ever done so, what might it look like? Judging by what we see in this, his most pornographic film to date, it would likely be disturbing. Sex here, apart from the shower scene insert, ranges from obsessive to pathological but is never rejuvenating or arousing — the biggest taboo to censors and ratings authorities. Although frequently nude, Gainsbourg seems pale, gaunt and sapped of any erotic glow (although in an exploitative twist she is fetchingly presented on the poster and key ad art images). The sex she engages in with Dafoe is never exciting. There are clinically pornographic moments, but there is no overall explicit sensuality to it, and this is due not just to the exigencies of censorship but to von Trier’s own view of sexuality as an ominous force. Aside from his first feature, The Elements of Crime, where a well-endowed Me Me Lai goes topless through a number of scenes, there is not much tease to a von Trier film.
At Cannes, the film seemed to rattle not only the reviewers but von Trier himself, who in addition to shucking responsibility for it (“God made me do it”), tried to race out of the theatre as soon as the last scene faded to avoid the inevitable adulation and applause that he seems to detest as much as the jeers. Peter Aalbæk Jensen divulged that at the gala premiere, they had instructed the projectionist to raise the lights as soon as the credits began to roll so he could dash out of the auditorium. But the projectionist forgot, and von Trier had to endure the slavish attention he is almost guaranteed at Cannes. Danish critic Per Theil reports that von Trier bolted from the auditorium, having being seized by a panic attack, while others claimed he just had to go take a piss. In any case, noted Theil, “Lars (von) Trier was without a doubt piss-afraid of his own film.”
Fear and discomfort is such a part of von Trier’s DNA that it’s become a cliché. But one fear seems to plague him most — the fear of self-complacency that comes with success. In his first manifesto written back in 1984, he scorns “the old masters” whose “willingness to please and great fear of self-disclosure” dooms them to a comfortable, routine, self-assured existence “at peace with themselves.” Their . . . relationship with their films constitutes an “ideal marriage . . . the fall out of which cannot even manage to offend the neighbors: no noisy fights at midnight . . . no compromising half-naked episodes on the stairway.”
With Antichrist he is struggling with himself, half-naked on the stairway, late at night. At a time when we expect everybody to “have it together,” that’s a discomforting position to be caught in. Von Trier can’t let himself become one of those self-satisfied old masters. In a careerist-ridden industry, he has never consciously attempted to make a profitable movie, and he is even mortified by his own creations.
All of this has given him the reputation of a neurotic, and it was that familiar figure who was back at Cannes after an extended absence . . . the man-of-a-million phobias, the dysfunctional genius, ever ill-at-ease and introverted. At the festival he trundled effetely about garbed in a white summer suit and broad-brimmed straw hat, a pair of small old-fashioned spectacles perched on his nose, looking oh so much like Swedish playwright August Strindberg, whom he credited as an inspiration for Antichrist along with Andrei Tarkovsky and Poe.
Von Trier has claimed a shifting array of inspirations for each film, but usually they are snobby European “artist” types. By referencing Poe — surely as hip a figure as Jimi Hendrix or Bruce Lee — was he suddenly going pop? Unlikely. When a woman at a roundtable discussion ventured that to her mind his films had more in common with Dario Argento than with his usual art film idols, he laughed it off — “Who’s that?“
