Somehow, a shovel seems a more appropriate implement for dealing with Lars von Trier's Antichrist than any sort of writing utensil.
While some critics describe the film as vile and disgusting, that sort of moral judgment seems beside the point when dealing with a bullshit artist like von Trier. Certainly Antichrist offers disturbing graphic images -- including one of Charlotte Gainsbourg performing a self-circumcision with a pair of scissors and another of her hitting hubby Willem Dafoe in the groin with a log so hard that his penis ejaculates blood.
Sorry -- I didn't say "spoiler alert" there. But this film is rancid long before it reaches that point.
Von Trier's crimes are ones of intellectual humbuggery. And that's been the case for much of his filmmaking career, whether it was the overpraised Breaking the Waves (a film whose saving grace is Emily Watson's performance), the unwatchably silly Dancer in the Dark or the pretentious Dogville and Manderlay. And now Antichrist, a film built from bogus conceits, crammed with meaningless symbols -- all apparently in the flim-flam artist's hope that he can disguise this trash as treasure.
To some critics, apparently, he has. To me, however, he's a charlatan masquerading as an artist or, at best, an artistic prankster. Sorry -- it just doesn't wash.
The plot, such as it is, deals with a married couple, meaningfully named He and She (Dafoe and Gainsbourg). Their tow-headed offspring falls out of a window one snowy night while He and She make slow-mo love in the shower. A less generous soul would speculate that the unfortunate child had read the script and jumped to spare himself the experience of the rest of the film.
The child's death sends She into such a tailspin that He stops relating to her as a husband and starts treating her as a therapist dealing with a patient. (He does happen to be a therapist -- oh, the irony.)
She, however, is hung up on things she's read about society's historic hatred of women. Before long, she's conflated this with an evil she perceives in nature, deciding in a von Trier-esque leap that nature makes women evil, or something like that. I'm sure von Trier is no clearer about it than I am.
In desperation, He talks She into hiking out to their cabin in the woods -- because there's no place better to treat a phobia about nature than in the middle of nature, right? There, they encounter creepy, symbolic animal avatars, all trailing entrails, some of them talking. Never a good sign; at a minimum, it's a symptom of rabies or, worse, extreme artistic overreach.
Which brings us to the mutilation portion of the program, with the groin-smashing, leg-impaling and genitalia-snipping. (For fun, imagine a childish Jerry Lewis reading that sentence.) I once interviewed Ms. Gainsbourg but, after seeing this film, I feel positively intimate with her.
Let me state it simply: Lars von Trier is a fraud, who keeps making movies because he has somehow convinced enough people that his delusions or pretensions (the latter, more likely) are art and that his movies are worthwhile. Neither idea could be further from the truth.
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It rings particularly false since I just saw the film in question last night, with my own eyes and its considerable virtues were easily evident to me. No, it doesn't spoon-feed you anything. The payoff in this movie comes from what it evokes, not what it shows you. And yes, it's unflinching explicit in its (quite few, really) brief depictions of sex and physical violence. It probably will only appeal to diehard film buffs and Lars von Trier fans. Which is fine. Not every film needs to be "The Transformers".
This review seems to be more about the deficiencies of the reviewer than those of the film. This review shows that he Just Doesn't Get It. Perhaps he should stick to standard Hollywood fare that doesn't require the viewer to see past the surface, rather than trying to make pronouncements about directors and films he's unable to comprehend.
I've only seen Breaking the Waves and Dogville, and can't say that I enjoyed either (my wife was so frustrated at Breaking that she started a fight with me before we even got to the car. We still laugh about it), but I could definately see them classified as art. Your review is so venomous, it essentially heralds Antichrist as artist. The more you fight against it, the more you make it true.
Hate is not the opposite of love. Apathy is. You might be more successful at dismissing this man's material if you gave it less credence. Just sayin'.
He tries too hard to be shocking most of the time, transgression for its own sake. When he makes the effort to create fully realized characters, like Bess, Jan, and Selma, instead of the cartoonish meat puppets that populate the rest of his ouvre, the resutls are impressive.
The real sacriledge was the awful dialogue.
"Antichrist" has _plenty_ to offer besides violence and blood. But it doesn't spoon-feed it to you. It's the sort of movie we've become unaccustomed to today: one that demands a lot of its viewers. If you're one of those (many, many) people who goes to the theater to turn your brain off, definitely don't see it. The payoff in this movie comes from what it evokes, not what it shows you.
In fact, from the reviews, I expected it to be much gorier than it was... there is actually very little physical violence in it, it's just that the few scenes of violence that there are, are particularly harrowing.
Look, this movie may not be for you. But not everybody is like you. You can't believe somebody would defend it? Take a look at what the critics say, they aren't as harsh as Marshall Fine. They can defend it because they've seen Lars' work before and know what they are getting themselves into. They can also defend it because they know that they need to actually see a movie before passing judgment.
For what it's worth, I loved Dancer in the Dark, Breaking the Waves, Zentropa and most of his other films. There are a lot more people like me, not to mention the critics who reward him with good reviews. And did I mention the awards he wins at major movie festivals? It's true, Lars isn't for everybody. But the one thing he's not is a "fraud."
Generally the more amateur is the opinion, the more overworught and categorical.
The Idiots is one of the most profound films I've ever seen about the futility of what human beings try to do to overcome tragedies in life that we have struggle to comprehend. Breaking the Waves was about what the world does to innocence. Dogville was about American pretension and small-scale hegemony. It also had the single most satisfying film ending since The Shawshank Redemption. Manderlay was a thoroughly original critique of US foreign policy and liberalism.
He is clearly talking about issues and themes that you don't seem to connect to or understand. That's fair enough. But I do, so maybe I'll read film critics, like Roger Ebert, who called one Breaking the Waves one of the best films of the 90s, or directors like Quentin Tarantino, who declared that Dogville would have won the pulitzer prize if it had been made as a play and he considers it one of the best film scripts ever written.