By the time He strangles Her and burns her body on a pyre outside the cabin, the shock value has all but completely drained away. Her violence culminates in the shocking sight of her cutting off her own clitoris with a pair of rusty shears.
#Antichrist movie willem dafoe nude full
She is simultaneously the embodiment of the revenge-seeking witch and a most creative and proficient bricoleuse, resourcefully making full use of the contents of the handyman’s toolbox stored away in the cabin.
She has internalized the witch hunters’ condemnation of female sexuality and women’s “nature,” an intellectual error diagnosed helpfully by her rationalist husband, who then suffers the consequences of his truth telling: She attacks him savagely, crushing his genitals with a piece of firewood, and hobbles him by drilling a hole through one of his legs and bolting a grindstone to it. The intellectual project also becomes a key to her pathology. Meanwhile, we learn of Her abandoned academic thesisa project on “gynocide,” a vague and almost archetypal exposition of man’s murderous hostility toward woman, wherein the Northern European witch hunts of the early modern period stand in for “woman murder” tout court. His therapy is controlling and manipulative, and eventually it produces in her a chaotic rage that culminates in grotesque acts of violence reminiscent, perhaps, of the films of David Cronenberg, or of Eli Roth. He is the embodiment of rationality, while She is a paragon of passion, grief, hysteria, and fury. The chapters“Grief,” “Pain (Chaos Reigns),” “Despair (Gynocide),” and “The Three Beggars”track the two characters’ journey to a cabin in the woods called Eden, where He, a therapist, plans to treat Her for the grief and fear that have paralyzed her in the wake of their child’s accidental death. Trailer for Lars von Trier, Antichrist, 2009. This is our first clue that we are in for it. The child’s death is disturbingly aestheticized, a thing of beauty rather than the stuff of tragedy. All of this action is shot lavishly and set to Almirena’s poignant aria “Lascia ch’io pianga” (“Leave that I might weep”) from Handel’s opera Rinaldo. The prologue sets up the narrative premise for the entire film: While He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Gainsbourg) engage in passionate, slow-motion, nothing-left-to-the-imagination sex, their toddler, Nic, manages to descend from his crib, open the baby gate, climb up on a desk (in the process knocking three metal figurinesa bit like toy soldierslabeled “Pain,” “Grief,” and “Despair” to the floor), and plunge poetically out an open window to his death at precisely the same moment that his parents arrive at orgasm. Indeed, what are we to make of a film that announces itself with a simple title shot featuring the words “Lars von Trier” and “Antichrist,” the second t in the title written to form the symbol for “female” (♀)? Are the name and the epithet set intentionally in apposition? Does von Trier mean to claim the title Antichrist as his own? Does he want to suggest that the Antichrist is female? Or rather, in the state of depression in which he claims to have written the film, did von Trier simply spend too much time dabbling in Nietzsche, whose Anti-Christ he says he has kept on his bedside table ever since he was twelve? In a world so steeped in apocalyptic sensibilities, what labor do this film and its provocative title perform? And, in the end, can we really be expected to care what the answers to these questions are?Īntichrist is divided into four chapters, bookended by a prologue and an epilogue, both shot in black and white. Whoever set up the theater for the screening clearly had a sense of humor, something one cannot fail to appreciate as a salutary antidote to the toxic glibness of von Trier, who proclaimed himself the “best film director in the world” this year at Cannes.
Waiting for the screening to begin, a small group of critics paged absently through the press kit while serenaded by a cleverly selected sound track: Serge Gainsbourg (the father of Antichrist’s female lead, Charlotte Gainsbourg) and Brigitte Bardot performing their 1967 pop hit “Bonnie and Clyde,” and Johnny Cash and June Carter singing their duet “Jackson,” a song about failed passion, sexual bravado, and the ever-present threat of intimate humiliation. LARS VON TRIER’S ANTICHRIST had provoked audiences at Cannes to boos, laughter, condemnation, and the occasional declaration of genius two months before making its way into a small theater in Greenwich Village on a gorgeous summer morning this past July.
Lars von Trier, Antichrist, 2009, still from a black-and-white and color film in 35 mm, 109 minutes.