A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Saturday, November 18, 2017

Antichrist (Lars von Trier, 2009)

Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg in Antichrist
He: Willem Dafoe
She: Charlotte Gainsbourg
Nic: Storm Acheche Sahlstrøm

Director: Lars von Trier
Screenplay: Lars von Trier
Cinematography: Anthony Dod Mantle 
Production design: Karl Júlíusson
Film editing: Åsa Mossberg, Anders Refn

Any film that begins with a toddler climbing to an upper-story window and falling to his death while his parents have graphically photographed sex has a lot of work cut out for it. Unfortunately, Lars von Trier isn't up to the task he sets for himself: Antichrist is morally and intellectually confused in ways that even arch-provocateur von Trier's earlier films haven't been. It plays like a horror film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (if Tarkovsky had been a less grounded and imaginative director), which shouldn't be surprising since the film's credits include a "horror film researcher" and is dedicated to Tarkovsky, whose film The Mirror (1975) reportedly served as a direct inspiration for von Trier. Antichrist became a cause célèbre when it was shown at Cannes, where some people reportedly fainted and others walked out, but Charlotte Gainsbourg went on to win the best actress award. American critics were similarly divided, with A.O. Scott of the New York Times calling it "ponderous" and "conceptually thin and ... dull" but Roger Ebert praising both the commitment of the actors and the director's drive "to confront and shake his audience more than any other serious filmmaker -- even Buñuel and Herzog." Some critics had it both ways, praising it with reservations: Tom Long of the Detroit News labeled it "probably the best film ever that you'd recommend to absolutely no one." Ebert's measured praise seems to me the most appropriate: Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe are the main reasons anyone who is fascinated by the art of acting should see Antichrist. They throw themselves into near-impossible roles, full of contradictions and sometimes misconceived ideas about psychotherapy and the relationship between men and women, and yet manage to overcome the limitations of the screenplay. And while I would never mention von Trier in the same breath as Tarkovsky or Buñuel (Herzog, maybe), I can't help feeling that there is an immense talent at work in his films. Antichrist was born out of von Trier's period of clinical depression, and while that's not enough to excuse the film's incoherence, it certainly makes it more interesting as a personal work of art.
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