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Who says that the ability to shock is the privilege of the young? Sometimes you need an old dog to teach the young ones tricks – like how to portray acts so shocking, even in the era of torture porn at the multiplex, that they leave your jaw on the floor. If I had dentures, I'd be groping for them, too.
The first five minutes of Lars von Trier's Antichrist contain both a scene of eye-opening sexual explicitness and an act of tragic misadventure so extreme that it begs a new word to describe over-the-top: Baroquecoco, maybe.
The couple in the film is played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, who are well-known enough actors to suggest that body doubles were used for at least for the initial erotic interlude. But that's not the case for the rest of the film which features the two in various instances of coupling and decoupling (literally, though to say any more would give the game away).
They play an unnamed couple, recovering from a personal tragedy, who retreat to their remote cabin called Eden to heal. The religious (and sexual and Freudian) imagery only gets more extreme from there. It's as if Don't Look Now took a huge hit of peyote and moved to the mountains.
The audience at the first Cannes screening – and there would have been many who had seen the Danish auteur's disturbing earlier movies – didn't seem to know how to react, alternately gasping and laughing as the acts of violence became ever more weird. One bit of self-mutilation in particular is not likely to help von Trier's reputation as a director who has a tricky time representing women (along with lines like, “A crying woman is a scheming woman.”)
He seems, however nuttily, to be making some point about women, nature and history - though I'm honestly not sure if I know what it is or if he does either. He's said that this is the movie he made to recover from depression, and it is laden with dream images and references to Freud and psychoanalysis. It's also loaded with a big trunkful of crazy … Ingmar Bergman meets Saw, let's say.
Von Trier is to subtlety what Don King is to neat hair. This movie is not likely to endear him to suburban audiences (I prophesy a Variety review: “Pic not natural date fodder, auds may find odd.”) but it sure isn't boring.
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