Lars Van Trier's Antichrist
Antichirist film is marred by the genius of its director. The story and filming had yet started on the wheel cover, a plastic beauty and extraordinary visual emerged from the first images of the film. A couple, a man and a woman, filmed in slow motion black and white on the background music of Handel, make love in a bathroom while their children, left to himself, leaves his room and throws herself from a window. The first pictures are beautiful by the contrast they operate: contrast between the ground and fast cutting, dry the plans, the camera upside down, and slow slow motion contrast between the clinical, hygienic, lay the place where the couple made love, the white bath, and the lyricism of the music seems to transport us in a time metaphysical and archetypal. Contrast between the horizontal planes of the couple copulating, knocked on their washing machine, and the verticality of the fall of the child, caught up, absorbed by the vacuum.
The extreme stylization of staging this incipit in the film returns the viewer to a kind of original image, a prelude to a dive into the depths of the unconscious. However, the early images is a problem, that ruins the already visual pleasure: the parallel arrangement between the couple making love and the child who dies establishes a causal relationship between these two phenomena, love and death already specifies the themes of guilt, placed in a Judeo-Christian cultural reference is too obvious not to be suspicious. The filmmaker has already placed his characters in a straitjacket symbolic too dogmatic, encloses them in orbit omniscient, guilt, overhanging the eye of the camera. The themes of Eros and Thanatos, copulation and fall, original sin, are therefore the engine of the film and the script, and will release the film in their sanctimonious poison.
After this successful opening stylistically and thematically disturbing, the filmmaker confronts us with the couple trying to survive the death of the child and live with the feeling of guilt. She (Charlotte Gainsbourg, absolutely amazing) is taken from various phobias, she is delirious with pain and overwhelming, totally uncontrollable; Him cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist trend, trying to help him through various exercises (Breath control; confrontation with images that scare, etc.). To stem the forces of the unconscious mind working and being with his wife, he believes good to take him to Eden, a place in the forest where the couple had once known happiness with her child, to compare it with the images of his past and so to defuse, he believes, with the optimism of scientific positivism irritating. But things were different: Eden, evil forces are unleashed, as the fevered imagination is unleashed, morbid, disgusting a filmmaker who does not know where give head in the trash ideological and symbolic repository where it becomes entangled. In fact, what is problematic in the film is that the filmmaker as much as his characters are experiencing delusional tendencies. The film deals with a heavy symbolic load of different topics, assembled and stacked on each other in a heap indigestible: it fuses a bazaar of psychoanalysis, which we do not know ultimately if it is part of Freud and Jung Both the filmmaker tangled brushes in various thematic references to psychoanalysis (and the collective unconscious and archetypal themes, Flights animist symbolism Jung and the presence of residues such as Freudian sexuality as an engine of individual neuroses), a Judeo-Christian themes, nonsensical, mixing imagery of Christ, witchcraft, symbols of cross, the wheel of torture, etc.; imaging naturalist and conservationist, with talking animals, a nature that the filmmaker wants noisy presence but makes it loud and thumping. In sum, the "Chaos reigns, not in external and internal nature, as suggested by the talking fox in the film (snicker play that made a lot of people in the room as she was grotesque) but in the spirit of Lars Van Trier.
Then, the mixture of genres is equally confusing and clumsy as the various cultural and symbolic rear bottom of which the film is overloaded. The first part is rather Bergmanesque, replaying the confrontation between the couple and tearing it generates, with the successful clinical differences between the reactions of men and women cope with pain (a little cliche anyway, but good), then it veers more towards a trend tarkovskienne, when the two characters go to Eden to discover the natural forces that are in them, just how Solaris by the end, the film turns to outright horror and gore, it is also weak and without substance "massacre in Transcona, claim intellectual and artistic as well.
At the end of the film, the viewer leaves leached by both chaotic and ugly images, stunned by the symbolic marking of the filmmaker.
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