236 - Antichrist, 2009, Denmark (France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Germany). Dir. Lars von Trier.
What's in a name?
This film is not about a rising new tyrannical world leader hailing from Asia Minor.
It is about a married couple grieving the loss of their son.
It is about the therapist husband's self-assured attempts to use therapy to help his wife cope.
It is about a woman overcome with grief and racked with feelings of guilt to the point of yielding to the conviction that she is evil.
It is about mysterious forces that enter into a marriage to destroy it.
It is about anxiety.
The name apparently applied to the original movie that von Trier intended to make. He rewrote it when an executive producer gave away the ending.
He also rewrote it when in a state of intense depression.
I do not believe the title applies very much to the finished film.
And I think the title led Roger Ebert to misinterpret the film. Ebert tries to identify the Antichrist, and since there is a man, a woman, and a child, Ebert settles on the man. The characters are He, She, and Nik. So Ebert says He is the Antichrist.
Ebert may as well have chosen from the deer, the fox, and the crow and come more closely to an accurate identification. But all of that is beside the point. It is reductive, and it is a faulty understanding of the title.
So let us move on.
The film opens in black-and-white, in extreme slow motion. von Trier tells us he shot it on a RED One at 1000 framers per second. He refers to the result as monumental style.
He (Willem Dafoe) looks at us, completely still, as beads of moisture descend. von Trier is the director of precipitation, and throughout this film and the films that have preceded it, we are constantly in the midst of falling rain, snow, shower water, bubbles, flakes, debris, and acorns. His style is intensely cinematic.
He and She make love. By the tumbling dryer. And in one of the great rack focuses, we shift from watching them in what we thought was the foreground to the baby monitor which is now the foreground, placing them in the background.
(It is great because we discover that we are looking from a greater distance through a series of objects. The focus does not merely shift from focus point A to focus point B with two discrete focus points, but rather, after zooming slowly out a bit, the focus moves fluidly through the plane, with multiple continuous focus points picking up objects, such as a glass of water, a bottle, and what may be a glass door, between focus points A and B. So there are really focus points A, B, C, D, and E, on to infinity. The pull also moves slowly so that images shift from being finely defined to increasingly distorted before finally going out of focus.
Watching this movement helps me to articulate why I so often detest the modern trend of rack focusing. It is often used clumsily and indiscriminately, like a nervous tick. It often takes power away from the viewer and gives it to the cinematographer when it is wrong to do so. It also draws attention to the cinematographer when it is not appropriate to do so. (It is not about you!) However, here, where we are in the hands of someone who knows what he is doing, it is done artfully and cinematically. And when one performs a rack focus this way, then it works. And it works the way it was supposed to work--by giving the viewer one piece of information and then another, with everything in between being just as beautiful as the two end points.)
And here is the important observation.
The baby monitor is muted!
That clue will open up the whole film for you.
Viewers may miss the twist at the end of this film--involving Nik's shoes and his feet--or choose to overlook it, because they do not wish for the film to go in the direction that it may be going. But it really may be going in that direction.
The film is made with technical mastery, cinematic beauty, and artistic integrity. It is also difficult to watch. von Trier allows his thoughts and ideas to end up on screen without censoring them.
So we go on the ride with him wherever his mind may go.
The last two filmmakers we have been watching represent two poles of how upbringing shapes artistic vision.
Ingmar Bergman is famously known for having been brought up in a strict religious environment where his thoughts and behaviors were rigorously scrutinized and where he was routinely and zealously punished.
Bergman spent much of his career working through his thoughts about authority and freedom and trying to make his own way.
Lars von Trier, however, was brought up by Communist nudist free-thinking parents who gave him no boundaries and allowed him complete freedom to do as he pleased.
von Trier has publicly stated for years that this was wrong, that it placed too much responsibility on the child, that it created great anxieties in him, as he had to make every single decision for himself--such as when to go to bed at night--without having the capacity or resources to make those decisions.
Both men seem to have longed for a loving home.
The one, for the love of grace. The other, for the love of discipline and guidance.
If you watch Antichrist with the commentary turned on, you will hear a very likeable filmmaker speaking openly and honestly with his interviewer companion Murray Smith.
von Trier freely shares with Smith whatever technical secrets Smith wants to know, from choices of camera and lenses to special effects to post-production computer work to animal wrangling to foley recording.
He also freely shares with Smith his thoughts about symbolism and meaning, and what he intended when he wrote or filmed a particular scene.
And he talks about his own anxiety and depression.
Lars von Trier is someone for whom it is easy to feel compassion. He is a brilliant man and a great artist who openly struggles with mental illness. He wishes he had more safe boundaries given to him when growing up, and he struggles with the results of that indiscriminate license.
I first discovered von Trier when I saw Breaking the Waves in 1997, the year after it first came out, at a film festival at the Directors Guild, on Sunset Blvd.
I felt a sense of honesty then too, and I appreciated his messy way of approaching questions of faith.
I became a fan of then newcomer Emily Watson, who was nominated for an Oscar in her first-ever film performance--and again a couple years later with Hilary and Jackie--and was already a fan of the solid Stellan Skarsgard, whom we just saw in Erik Skjoldbjaerg's Insomnia.
Relationships change your perspective.
If you watch this film by itself without any contextualizing information, you may very well have a visceral reaction to it. You may even reject it outright.
If you watch it with an affection for its creator, then you may appreciate more what he is trying to do. Even if you would rather not go there fully with him.
On another level, working on a film like this is an actor's dream.
von Trier provides the actor with the challenge to commit and go to those deepest of places. Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsborough are most clearly up to the challenge. And who would ever assume otherwise?
She won the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival in the midst of whatever controversy the film may have engendered.
The controversy might not only have been for the graphic depictions of nudity and violence.
It might not only have been for the apparent misanthropic and misogynistic view of the world.
It might have also been for something else lurking beneath the surface.
In the end He may have liberated centuries of falsely accused and wrongfully killed women.
But in order to do so, there may have had to be a sacrifice.
Maybe not all are falsely accused. Maybe not all are wrongfully killed.
Maybe one of them is guilty.
What if the film really does identify an antagonist after all?
And what if it is not He?
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