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Lars and the real world
Von Trier's latest, Antichrist, leaves some critics waiting for the punch line.
No matter what happens when Lars von Trier’s Antichrist plays at the Chicago International Film Festival, the movie couldn’t possibly cause as big a sensation as it did when it premiered at Cannes in May. Journalists greeted the first screening with boos, jeers, laughter and a smattering of thunderous applause.
“Screw it. I’m getting behind it,” a Canadian critic told me as the credits rolled—a bold claim considering that absolutely no one in the theater had any idea what we’d just witnessed. “I love how there’s a credit for ‘misogyny research’!” shouted another critic nearby. Nowhere near Cannes, Berlin-based review aggregator David Hudson captured the mood when he tweeted, “Step outside and you can actually feel the shock waves. That von Trier must be something else.” At the next day’s press conference, von Trier, 53, claimed to be “the greatest director in the world.”
A colleague remarked that the film actually played like a manual on how to start a scandal at a film festival. Throw in sex, pretentious dialogue and laughably incongruous elements like a talking fox—but add just enough serious material to guarantee the movie a cadre of defenders.
Since then, some of the shock has worn off, so it’s possible the reaction at this week’s CIFF will be blasé. But in a supremely waggish mood, as always, the Danish provocateur is having none of it. If you believe him—and that’s always a dicey prospect—Antichrist was a totally sincere project from the start.
“First of all, I hate film festivals, and you know, to make a scandal there would only make it worse,” von Trier says by phone from Denmark. “On a conscious level, I’m not trying to make a scandal at a film festival.”
Maybe not. In terms of plot summary, there’s nothing too outlandish about Antichrist, which concerns a couple (Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe) who retreat to a woodland cabin after the accidental death of their son. The husband, a therapist, attempts to psychoanalyze his wife, but finds that her grief can’t be controlled. Strange, satanic things start to happen from there in a manner that sometimes recalls the hallucinatory films of solemn Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, to whom Antichrist is dedicated. Of course, the dedication itself got its share of laughs.
So is Antichrist a joke? “Not more than all the films I’ve done,” von Trier says. “When I was writing Breaking the Waves, I was laughing at [the ending, in which the bells of heaven ring for the main character]. It depends on what a joke is. None of it was designed to make people laugh, that’s what I can say.”
But certainly he was joshing around with his press kit—right? In his “director’s confession,” he claims that “the script was finished and filmed without much enthusiasm, made as it was using about half of my physical and intellectual capacity…. Scenes were added for no reason. Images were composed free of logic or dramatic reasoning.” He offers “no excuse for Antichrist” but calls it “the most important film of my entire career.”
“It wasn’t meant so negatively as it can be read,” von Trier explains. “It meant that I wasn’t so controlling, because I have this stupid depression that I don’t want to tire you with. But when I got an idea, I didn’t make so much censorship as I would have done if I had been in my normal health.”
No kidding—could the talking fox have made it in otherwise? And without giving things away, Antichrist depicts very violent actions performed on very sensitive body parts in close-up. It’s been suggested that Antichrist is von Trier’s contribution to the torture-porn craze, although he says the genre was previously unknown to him (“But it sounds interesting!”). There’s also a question of whether the movie continues the alleged misogynistic streak of von Trier’s work (e.g., the martyrdom fantasies of Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark), or whether it’s actually a critique of his reputation for misogyny.
“I think that the interest of this subject is very much my mother’s fault,” von Trier says. “She was kind of chairman of the Danish women’s lib at some point, and you know, being the son of a mother in that position has been quite hard. It’s kind of overwhelming. Maybe that’s where it comes from…. [It’s] just kind of depressing when you look back at your stuff and see that it was actually a master plan of your mother’s.” (He says his confidence—that “greatest director in the world” stuff—was “the only good thing she gave me.”)
It’s not the first time a von Trier film has met with a wildly divergent response. Dancer in the Dark was treated as risible in some quarters; in others, it was hailed as having an emotional purity that recalled silent melodrama. Indeed, von Trier doesn’t let himself off the hook for his provocations. Antichrist’s sly opening credits—in order—read, “Lars von Trier,” “Anti Christ.”
The director is also known for his self-criticism. He has problems with 2005’s Manderlay because it repeated the minimalist style of 2003’s Dogville, and he feels repetition isn’t good for his personality. Nor is he so bullish at this point on Antichrist. “There’s a lot of things in the film that I didn’t think we really performed very well,” von Trier says, although he does admire a particular scene that required porn doubles, which he calls an homage to Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets. (“It’s for Marty,” von Trier says.)
You can’t help but worry a little for von Trier, who wanted it to be known that he was, in fact, having a good day when we spoke. “I don’t think I’ve been suicidal,” he says. “Only doing the films. It’s kind of suicidal to go to Cannes with a film like Antichrist.”
He adds, “That was a joke also.”
Antichrist plays at the Chicago International Film Festival Monday 12. It opens at the Music Box October 23.
