dir. Lars von Trier
Rating: ✮✮✮1/2
Oh, Lars.
ANTICHRIST is a film with a lot of fascinating ideas rolling around in its fucked-up head, but none of them really coalesce into something satisfyingly concrete--which is probably von Trier's intention, but unfortunately lends the film an air of "if only...." The first half is curiously dull, and one finds themselves waiting for things to spring to life, but when it finally does, it never quite manages to attain the level of despairing horror it seems to be going for until the very third act, where She drags He back to their cabin and the film's bleakness finally manages to sink into the viewer's bones. What ultimately redeems Antichrist is its brilliant cinematography, Gainsbourg's performance (although she's not nearly as flawless as some critics would lead you to believe) and, most of all, its ideas.
Interpretations (contains SPOILERS):
As stated by the film, Nature is evil, what with all the endless death and predation and wretchedness, so it could not have been created by God--it could only have been created by Satan. Applying ancient gender stereotypes (even the old "women are clingy and afraid of men leaving them" gets thrown into the mix), the film posits that women are closer to nature (the "Mother" in "Mother Nature"), and therefore inherently evil. Men are just as evil, but like Willem Dafoe's smug asshole of a therapist, they don't realize it, and try to impose reason and order upon Nature, where as a talking auto-cannibalistic fox points out, "chaos reigns!" He thinks he can rationalize away his inherent murderous animalism, but in the end, nature will drag him back down with his female counterparts.
Sex is evil. In an interview, von Trier has mentioned that he thinks sex is something that holds human beings back from truly being civilized. So, in Antichrist language: She is a woman, woman is nature, nature is barbaric, sex is nature, She wants sex constantly, sex is barbaric. He and She are divided by sex, both the physical act and gender. It is the natural catalyst for their downward spiral. Their child dies while the two are doing it, and She is too far-gone in mid-orgasm to care as she sees her son topple out the window. This is what re-ignites her self-hating madness.
Charlotte Gainsbourg's character goes progressively more insane researching gynocide, the killing of women by men. She comes to believe that all women are just as evil as they are portrayed in the Bible and other historical texts ("A crying woman is a scheming woman..."). What's more, she fears that gynocide is the natural order of things (He: "I am nature" She: "What do you want, Mr. Nature?" He: "To hurt you as much as I can.") He dismisses this as ridiculous, but as She goes progressively more insane and violent, Nature seemingly guides him toward Her conclusion, and he eventually murders her and burns her body. Nature rewards him with food for following out with its plans--the implication being that gynocide and misogyny are part of nature, and are an inherited Darwinian trait. Which is, unfortunately, true (examine the behaviors of all animal species in existence--the VAST majority are male-dominated, even non-sentient organisms; nature favors the male on top for some reason). von Trier has sneakily, and probably facetiously, encoded a psuedo-feminist subtext here to counter the film's over-the-top misogyny: If Nature is evil and Satanic, then so is misogyny, as it is a big part of nature.
Does Lars von Trier hate women? The constant accusations of misogyny he's accumulated in Phase II of his career (Breaking the Waves and everything since) have always struck this reviewer as missing the point. von Trier characters are not people, they are Ideas dressed up in human form. When Emily Watson, Bjork and Nicole Kidman are subjected to horrific treatment in his films, it is not because they are women, it is because their characters represent something. It's no different in his earlier films, where the male protagonists suffer equally horrible, drawn out fates (see the end of Europa). In a recent interview, von Trier stated that he thinks "women are just as bad as men," which, its prankster-ish wording aside, is more than anything a sensibly misanthropic, as opposed to misogynistic, point of view.
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