Lars von Trier (2009)
I walked out after forty minutes and admit I chickened out – I was dreading the sequence I knew was coming in which the woman mutilates the man’s genitals. But if I hadn’t been very bored by Antichrist it would have been harder to leave. This is an art film in the clearest and in a pejorative sense. During its prologue a couple – credited as He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) – are making love: first, in the shower, as their young son Nic (Storm Acheche Sahlstrom) wakes and opens the gate to his cot; then in bed, as Nic, wanting to get closer to the magical snowflakes falling outside, exits from an upstairs window and to his death. The monochrome images are exquisitely composed and the solemn, stately movement of the camera is, for a minute or two, hypnotising. But the Handel music (a soprano aria called ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’ – ‘Let me weep’) is an emblem of the cultural ambition at work and its effect is immediately distancing. By the end of the prologue, Lars von Trier has succeeded (I don’t know if this is his aim) in excluding any emotional response to what he’s showing. The sex is unerotic; the child’s death is a piece of design.
As the camera tours the house in this opening section, it pauses on three statuettes – a bit like Giacometti figures – bearing the names ‘grief’, ‘pain’ and ‘despair’. You don’t get a sense of what these figures say about either the taste or the frame of mind of He and She; you soon realise that their primary purpose is to provide von Trier with chapter titles for the movie. The ‘Grief’ section that follows the prologue does indeed concentrate on the couple’s reactions to Nic’s death: the woman, who seems to be a superannuated student, can’t cope at all; the man, a therapist, is infinitely patient, understanding and well-meaning. You can see why his conscientious calmness gets on her nerves although the relentless, numb expressionless of her replies is no less grating. (Once Nic has gone, Antichrist is a two-hander.) Lars von Trier isn’t interested in He’s psychoanalytic efforts; the man’s questions are designed simply as feeds for She, to deliver cryptic replies. When Gainsbourg complains that Dafoe has always been distant and he asks for examples she says: ‘Well, for instance, last summer you were very distant from Nic and from me – you were remote as a father and a husband’. She isn’t then asked to explain in what way(s) he was distant. A few screen minutes later He asks where She feels most frightened. The reply is ‘the woods’ (which the couple also refer to as ‘Eden’). When asked what frightens her about them (a rare example of a follow-up question), she whispers back ‘everything’.
For most of ‘Grief’ the images are so drained of warmth that the movement into colour film is in effect minimal: the pervasive metallic pallor suggests the adamantine grip of bereavement but it does so obviously. When the couple go to an isolated woodland cabin – Dafoe’s attempt at ‘exposure therapy’ for Gainsbourg – it’s an arduous journey, seemingly on foot. The move outdoors enlarges the colour scheme but doesn’t alter the connection of sex and death – or perhaps motherhood and death – that was so explicit in the prologue. As Nic floated down to his death, the salient image in the shots of his copulating parents was the woman’s open mouth – a black void – as she approached orgasm. Now, in the woods, as Gainsbourg sleeps, Dafoe watches a female deer with a dead fawn hanging halfway out of her. The previous summer, when Dafoe was so remote, Gainsbourg had been trying to write a thesis – on gynocide. The Wikipedia entry on Antichrist mentions the use of ‘horror film conventions’ but they don’t include the everything-seemed-fine-until convention. There is no sense here of a life that was enjoyed but which the loss of the child destroyed. It’s striking, when He looks at family photographs, that She, pictured with the boy, looks not much less miserable than she does after Nic’s death. Charlotte Gainsbourg won the Best Actress prize at Cannes for Antichrist and some of her expressions of uncontrollable grief are impressive but neither she nor Willem Dafoe is anywhere near as strong a presence as Lars von Trier. And he is not good company.
31 May 2013
