Chaos Reigns! I was a guest on Steady Diet of Film podcast with Erin Donovan. We talked about Lars von Trier’s Antichrist… the greatest DeBeers commercial of all time.
I seem to be a particularly ideal audience for Antichrist, described once by a Cannes blogger as a hybrid of Scenes from a Marriage and Saw (two movies I really like for — clearly — very different reasons.) Plus the lead actress looks enough like me that coffee shop baristas sometimes comment on it and the men in the audience all sort of looked at me funny after the screening. I was really looking forward to this one. Unfortunately, it’s arduous. And not for the gore. That I don’t mind. It’s von Trier’s simplistic notion of a relationship. It’s not quite misogyny. It’s dumbness. Von Trier just isn’t as smart as say, Michael Haneke. Certainly not worthly of comparison with a brain like Ingmar Bergman. He’s just clever enough to come up with an idea that could be a great art film, but too thick to follow through with it. I did like The Idiots, well, at least I did in college when my appetite for “transgressive” film made me forgive some seriously terrible stuff. Maybe it wouldn’t hold up in a second viewing.) Still curious? Karina Longworth puts it best “It’s essentially a revenge of the witch/bitch movie, one that stacks together a few basic horror movie themes: ancient burial grounds, mythology come to life, sex as a precursor to death, and female sexuality in particular as potentially equivalent to a supernatural force of nature. After touching on all manner of hallmarks of classic supernatural cinema, Antichrist finally flips the script of the modern gore fest by putting a relatively chaste man at the mercy of a female whose sexuality is in crisis, thus turning Carol Clover’s ‘final girl’ theory on its head.”
The trailer for Lars von Trier’s Antichrist is up on Vimeo (via.)
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