Antichrist and the backblog

A confession is both in order and appropriate to this post. I've had my movie pass for a while. It took me longer to set up the blog than to see eight movies. Since this is a fallow time in my movie schedule, it seems a good time to whittle away at those films.

#1: Antichrist.

I maybe hate this movie. I maybe love this movie. I really don't know. At once it is openly pornographic, decidedly weird, and puts the whole idea of the idyllic country house retreat into doubt. If you dream about going to the country to write for a summer, you may not want to see this film. More than anything, it reminds me of director Lars von Trier's earlier film Europa. At any rate, it has little in common with his Dogma-95 films (which is all for the good, in my opinion, having high regard for both writers and editors). This film has the surrealism of his films Europa and Manderlay but without the minimalist cinematography and sets. Much of the strangest visual material has a purposefully ham handed CGI quality. And it is weird.

The film centers on the question of whether women are inherently evil or if this particular woman is just nuts, apparently driven so by working on her Ph.D. Willem Dafoe's character seems to exemplify the inability of men to resist really good sex, even if it is transgressive, professionally suspect, and just downright strange. The female lead's character (Charlotte Gainsbourg)apparently represents women's conflicted natures in re: their primary biological role in both Eros and Thanatos. Oh, and their child dies in the first scene, apparently because neither of them can control their sexual desire, so there is a good dose of puritan guilt about enjoying sex. Initially it seems that overcoming this guilt and developing a healthy, lusty, athletic, attitude toward marriage-sanctified sex is the cure for what ails them. By the end it seems pretty clear that all of the guilt and fears were well founded.

This film is not for the queasy. Lots of sexual violence, some of it onanistic, much of it presented in a fashion as to be calculatedly transgressive before becoming just plain transgressive. Plus a lot more of Willem Dafoe's naked ass than is technically essential to the plot.