If you walk into the cinema expecting to be shocked by Lars von Trier’s already infamous Antichrist, then you will be. I didn’t, and wasn’t.
I was certainly engaged and at times moved, but I couldn’t ignore the niggling suspicion which accompanies me every time I encounter such divisive work that I am being asked to praise the emperor’s new clothes. Everyone concurs that Antichrist is beautifully shot – the natural environment is captured with nothing short of rapture, but this is von Trier’s 13th feature so technical aptitude is to be expected, not applauded with awe. It also irritates me that this film, which tries so hard to provoke its audience, is incoherent in such a blustering, ponderous way that it will inevitably be hailed as a masterpiece by people for whom complexity of texture is more important than form. It certainly is a densely layered film in its employment of a symbolic vocabulary; as well as the Manichaean Christian implication of its title and the recurring references to Satan, there are also nods to German forest magic, tarot, witchcraft and astrology. Students of mythology will find plenty to occupy them here; however the use of these references is rarely surprising and always confused. For example, the unnamed couple’s son is called Nick, which gives us a hint of Saint Nicholas, patron of lost children, but also (admittedly with rather nice ambiguity), Old Nick/ Satan. But this never develops in any meaningful way: is the child actually a malign being, preternaturally capable of punishing his mother? Or is he some kind of saint, standing for pre-lapsarian innocence in the Eden that becomes Hell? Or what?
Meanwhile the motif of the Three Beggars seems original (it’s the title of a WB Yeats poem, but I can’t find any connection), yet to me it resembles a corollary of the three wise monkeys translated into the figures of the doe, the fox and the raven. The fox wears a bell, suggesting the blind beggar; the doe encountered by Willem Dafoe’s character as it is miscarrying its fawn appears deaf to his approach; and the raven… I’m not sure about the raven. The use of these animals does suggest a genuine mythical basis, a submerged allegory, but I just don’t believe it’s there in any coherent form. The fact that the fox speaks in a comedy-gremlin sort of voice doesn’t help because, even though talking animals are common enough in north European fables, in this context it’s a distracting intrusion of the supernatural into a treatment of nature which is otherwise both gothic and believable (nature’s deceptions – like acorns mimicking footsteps on a roof – are creepily present throughout).
That said, it is possible to identify some interesting questions posed by Antichrist. First, and most generally, is the question of whether myths describe reality or whether they mould it in their image. For example, does the structure of grief that the psychoanalyst describes come from the experience of grief, or is it an attempt to give that experience a shape? Furthermore one can ask, is the treatment an attempt to control Charlotte Gainsbourg’s character’s increasingly psychotic behaviour, or is it the discrepancy between the pattern and the experience that is at fault? This is, I think, part of a more general order/ chaos (and possibly art/ chaos) problematic. Consider constellations: Gainsbourg’s character finds the constellation of the three beggars on a star chart, and while there may be ‘no such constellation’, isn’t she simply imposing order shaped by experience onto chaos? And if that is the case, is the terror of the natural world she experiences a reaction to the cruelty and irrationality of the natural world, or is it a projection of her own cruelty and unreason?
As I said, this film could keep you busy, but only if you can suppress the suspicion that there really isn’t that much to Antichrist beyond headline-grabbing violence and a clutch of mythological references easily mistaken for a complex tissue of meanings, but which ultimately amount to very little.
Alphabet Rain 