Sunday, March 9, 2014

Antichrist (2009), a film by Lars von Trier


After my favorable experience watching Lars von Trier's Melancholia (see here), I decided to watch  another von Trier film, Antichrist (or, as represented in the title cards, Anti Chris♀). 

The film includes some very intense and disturbing sexual violence, very graphically depicted, including excrutiating genital mutilation shown up close. It's not for the faint of heart. I found myself on several occasions averting or wanting to avert my eyes. It’s unusual to see a director willing to go this far. The graphic intensity makes it hard for me to recommend the film to anyone except certain select friends. I can't imagine anything more opposite to your generic "date film." 

I’m trying to assess what the film overall means for me.

I'm intrigued on many levels, not least because of the medieval sensibility the film seems to achieve in its present-day refiguring of the Adam and Eve allegory.  

The plot is simple: A husband and wife, the unnamed characters "He" and "She," travel to a remote, isolated cabin deep in the woods -- a place they call Eden. There the husband, a trained psychotherapist, intends to heal his wife of the disabling grief and pain from which she suffers due to the death of their young child. 

Through the interactions between the couple and the mysterious surrounding natural environment, in an atmosphere evocative of horror films, the story explores and intensifies a deepening divide or conflict between He and She. The conflict variously manifests as one between intellect and emotion, control and chaos, human and nature, "normality" (to choose an intentionally ambiguous term) and incomprehensible evil. The dramatic exploration leads to ever darker places, and eventually brings the conflict to a horrific head. 

In the end, there is a kind of resolution to the threat (I'm being vague here only because, in this instance, I'm choosing not to give away the ending). More precisely, the circumstances come to an apparent end through terrible means, but the deeper conflict, I believe, remains unresolved, with no solution evident. Indeed, the film arguably figures our Judaeo-Christian civilization as trapped within a repeating cycle of sin, dramatizing western humanity's failure to escape a profround historical, and possibly ineluctable, entanglement with evil.

As I have construed it, the film and its ambiguous epilogue leave us with several daunting questions: e.g., Will this cycle continue? Is the conflict depicted absolute, rooted in nature, or of our own making? Where is the locus of the evil? of patriarchy? of misogyny?  What comes next in the human story?  Can we rewrite, not just in words but through redeeming historical transformation, the tale of what happened in the Garden of Eden?

In AntiChrist, I think, von Trier dramatizes a dark human conflict with deep roots in our culture, going back at least as far as the stories told in our most sacred western text. It finally leaves its viewers in the excruciating position either of finding a resolution, despite no apparent way forward, or of remaining in its condemning grip and conceding its unbearable irresolvability.

In Melancholia, as I see it, and as I suggested in my earlier review, von Trier explores related and analogous conflicts, albeit differently, and ultimately locates and valorizes forces of potential renewal.

The films are coherent with one another. Only, the emergence of hope and a provisional new way forward came later.



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