Antichrist

Directed by Lars von Trier

Runtime: 109 min.

HISTORY SHOULD RECORD Danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier as cinema’s biggest hoaxster.Von Trier’s never made a good film—Zentropa, Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Dogville (most of them part of his “Dogme” movement) were shams perpetrated on the culturally absent-minded—yet von Trier has bamboozled critics and festival organizers into repeatedly showcasing his hoodwinks. Von Trier’s new film Antichrist, starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, is his latest manipulative salvo. The quasi-religious title is misleading provocation; Antichrist is really anti-cinema.

Although Von Trier indulges today’s everspreading secularism by dramatizing hostile anti-Christianity, Antichrist’s plot makes hash of religion’s foundation in storytelling and mythology. Dafoe and Gainsbourg portray He and She, a modern Adam and Eve, who recover from their child’s death by retreating to a sylvan, literal Eden. In this anti-paradise, they abuse and brutalize each other: He’s a psychiatrist laying down self-improvement jargon; she is a scholar researching a thesis on “gynocide.” While offending the biblical notion of spiritual harmony, von Trier proudly plays the snake.

He destroys any edifying narrative benefit such as coherence. Divided into four chapters, illogically named after toys in the child’s bedroom (Pain, Grief, Despair,The Three Beggars), each of Von Trier’s segments dismantles order, rationality, belief. She tells He: “Dreams are of no interest in modern psychology. Freud is dead, right?”This removes the possibility of symbolism and metaphor. In Antichrist’s meaningless fairy tale there’s just male-female antagonism beginning with an explicit, degraded sex act where lustful parents ignore their child, invoke grief, forsake psychoanalysis, then attack each other savagely—out of anger, revenge, survival.Their base behavior is reflected in wild nature, where even animals rebel:When stalking the woods, She discovers a fox who prophesizes: “Chaos reigns.”That’s the closest von Trier’ comes to articulating an aesthetic.

At last month’s New York Film Festival press conference where Antichrist had its American premiere, von Trier was asked about blatantly naming the couple’s retreat “Eden.” He answered, “If it has anything to do with the Bible, it’s that God is dead. I’m sorry about the Eden stuff; it was very easy.” Clearly von Trier doesn’t care what high-minded ideas critics project onto his work and is contemptuous that they even try. Programmers, curators and critics take his folderol seriously—apparently to buttress their own cynicism and lack of faith.Yet von Trier’s always goofing.

His rationalization, “What the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve,” ought to be laughable. So should his husbandly advice: “You’re mourning but you’re in a new phase—anxiety.” Problem is, von Trier has no sense of humor—beyond being sadistic. Images of bound, wounded, still-born animals culminate in He and She maiming each other, including She’s self-inflicted clitorectomy—the counterpart, I guess, to castrating He, then masturbating him to ejaculate blood. It’s only funny if you’re looking for significance.

What’s most comical is our cultural gatekeepers’ willingness to be led into von Trier’s shallow thoughts on Faith, Feminism, Cinema. Just as many fell for von Trier’s inconsistent and arbitrary Dogme rules (von Trier himself broke his own low-budget, improvisation promises), they also swallow Antichrist’s simpleminded atheist tease.The plot has as little to do with Christianity as the J-horror films whose mystery and shock effects von Trier imitates.This is his latest attempt at dismantling genre—yet still begging for generic significance.Von Trier inconsistently toys with misogyny by suggesting He is hostile to She (“Mr. Nature, what do you want?” “To hurt you as much as I can”) then turns She into the film’s bloodthirsty monster. Next, von Trier refers to ancient witch hunts, leading to a climactic tableau of female legions coming out of the woods, climbing mountains.

Videographer Anthony Dod Mantle makes those woods dense yet vivid. Some landscapes, alternately B&W and color, are as mystifying as Wyeth.The sound design, as when He awakes to acorns falling, is eerily definite, which suggests von Trier has masterly filmmaking control. Fact is, he’s a mountebank, making nonsense as busily, relentlessly and nihilistically as our own Steven Soderbergh. Antichrist’s only sign of wit is an early montage that parallels a child’s death, the parents’ orgasm and a washing machine. Inanity, thy name is von Trier.