This is an open letter to Danish filmmaker extraordinaire Lars von Trier. Please note, I do not recommend that anyone see his new film Antichrist. It is shocking and disgusting and terrible. OK - maybe you should see it because it is so wonderfully bad. How von Trier is considered a modern master is beyond me. WARNING: This letter has lots of spoilers and might not be totally SFW. Again: Don't see this movie.
Dear Lars von Trier:
I wish I could say that when in Antichrist a dead fox with its guts spilling out jumps up and says directly to the camera 'chaos reigns' that I knew the picture was a piece of garbage. But sadly, this fact was clear to me way before this sequence. Your movie is totally fatuous, quasi-intellectual sophomorism. And you are a conceited demagogue.
Your film opens with what I think is a very elegant slow-motion sequence with Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg fucking wildly in the shower and their baby falling out an open window to his death, all while a Handel aria plays. This is nice, but is not even a close of anything to come. Once the baby dies, the Gainsbourg goes into a state of extreme shock (she seems to be bi-polar) and gets hospitalized.
When she wakes up (after a month in a coma!) Dafoe, who is some sort of psychiatrist, decides he doesn't like the treatment she's getting, so he flushes her meds down the toilet and resolves to treat her himself. As he treats her, she goes through several stages of 'recovery', with some episodes of crying, self-mutilation and, again, jumping on her husband to fuck him (I mean, why not!?). At a certain point, he decides that they should go to their country house deep in the woods, because he believes part of her problem is that she's afraid of nature (or something like that). Once she gets there, she begins to get better, but ultimately goes fucking bat-shit and attacks her husband.
Your need to show graphic sexuality on screen makes no sense to me. Yes, it's very frank, but I'm not sure it really helps tell the story. I don't need to see vaginal penetration in the opening sequence to understand they are screwing (I think you were trying to make a visual allusion to the stabby violence that would follow, but this was still pretty juvenile). I don't need to see Gainsbourg hit Dafoe in his erect cock with a paving stone and then jerk him off until he spooges blood on her shirt. I don't need to see her drill a hole in Dafoe's leg and then attach a grinding wheel to it with a wrench as a 'man-anchor'. I don't need to see her cut off her clitoris with a rusty scissors. None of these details give me a deeper understanding of anything and are basically all totally fucking gross.
I guess your point in this movie is that men keep women down and hurt them, so it is a woman's right to fight back. Or maybe that men make women into monsters, so we should not be surprised when women fight back. But this argument falls apart once we know that she is bi-polar and is suffering from an extreme depressive episode followed by an extreme manic episode. Also, Dafoe's biggest sin we know about is that he tries to become her shrink (I guess that's something about man's control over women), but this is not the worst sin in the world. Yes, it is very unethical, but it should not lead her to castrating him, or whatever she does. You also show Gainsbourg putting the kid's shoes on the wrong feet to torture him - which means either she's an incredibly negligent mother, or an outright evil one who hurts her child so directly. She is not an easy woman for us to love.
Most of the dialogue in the film is hilariously bad. Several times in the screening I went to, the audience laughed AT the film. At one point, after Gainsbourg has been depressed for several months and unresponsive to Dafoe's treatment, and he says earnestly, 'This is not going to work.' I mean - really, Lars?! That's the best line you could come up with? When the fox said 'chaos reigns', just about everyone in the theater laughed (again) - but aside from the ridiculous line, I don't even understand what the fuck it means. Is the fox a mythological symbol of chaos? Is the woman chaotic? Is there something about the relationship between men and women that is chaotic? Is the fox the Antichrist? I don't know.
Throughout the film, the cinematography is striking, but frustrating. I found that the blue-green, hyper-stylized look of the film made me forget at moments how bad the movie was and enjoy looking at it visually. Maybe it's unfair of me, but I want my bad movie to look really bad too. I think it's cheesy for your turd of a film to look good. (It's also very anti-Dogme 95 of you to have a film look so fancy, bt-dubs.)
I have a few final questions for you: Why is the film set in Seattle? It seems like a totally random place. Is this a criticism of American culture? I don't know how emblematic of America Seattle really is. (I also object to the fact that I don't really associate Seattle with snow, but rather with rain -so I think the snow in the opening sequence is lazy overkill and visual obfuscation). Do you object to psycho-pharmacology and talking therapy? Do you think one is better than the other? At one point it seems like you hate all therapy, but then you let the women who is in bad therapy hurt somebody, so maybe you like therapy. Which parts of the body did Willem DaFoe's body double play? What does this film have to do with Andrei Tarkovsky and why did you dedicate the film to him? Have you considered retirement, and if not, why not?
Most importantly: This film seems to break almost all of the Dogme 95 ten rules. Was this done on purpose? Do you think Dogme is bullshit the way we do? Of all the broken rules, #6 (no murders or weapons) is especially shot to shit - why did you do this? Do you think it makes you an ego-maniac and a hack to write a manifesto and then get sick of it after less than 14 years?
I appreciate that there is a credit at the end for 'research on misogyny' - but I think you are really a misanthrope - at least that's the only explanation I can figure on why you would make this movie - because you fucking hate humanity and want to make us suffer like dogs.
Sincerely,
Aaron
No Stars
Awesome.
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