Word: antichrists
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, and filmed in Germany by von Trier's longtime cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (Oscar winner for Slumdog Millionaire), Antichrist was greeted at Sunday evening's critics' screening with some appreciative applause and rather more vigorous boos, and gave plenty of ammunition to both sides. Yet you can say something about the 53-year-old auteur that couldn't be applied to everyone with films in the competition: he's a real moviemaker, a composer of rich imagery as evocative as it is provocative, a master matador at waving a red cape in front...
...Technical Prize at Cannes - and after showing Europa/Zentropa (Jury Prize, or third place) in 1991, Breaking the Waves (Grand Jury Prize, or second place) in 1996, and Dancer in the Dark (finally, the Palme d'Or) in 2000 - von Trier presents his eighth film in the competition. Antichrist is both his most familiar film - a horror film of a soul gone mad, as in Psycho and The Shining - and one of his most transgressive, which is reviewer's jargon for gross-out gruesome...
...fans of a mainstream sell-out; it "makes it seem, quite shockingly, like an uninspired piece of genre hackwork," wrote Xan Brooks on the Guardian blog. "Surely, that can't possibly be true." It's not. As von Trier has said in an interview with Knud Romer, he wrote Antichrist when he was bedridden by depression, and "I let the film flow to me instead of thinking it up... And because some of the material comes from my youth, it may be unreasonable, ecstatic." If even von Trier calls his film unreasonable, you can be sure it's not ordinary...
...Weird Witchcraft Antichrist begins in domestic rapture. In pristine black-and-white images rendered in slo-mo, and to a soprano's lofty rendition of Handel's Lascia ch'io pianga ("Leave me to weep over my cruel fate"), a couple makes love on a snowy evening. In another room the washing machine churns. In a third, the couple's son Nic escapes his crib to, and goes to a window ledge where he teeters, then falls to his death. The sex act, Nic's life and the wash conclude simultaneously. The child's last moment has a beauty...
...first half of Antichrist has enough storytelling vigor and sheen convince any critic, including those who thought von Trier went off the rails with his Dogville and Manderlay epics, that, hey, the guy can make a normal movie, and with the highest skill. There are visions here worth savoring, pure von Trier weirdo-magic, like the sight of Gainsbourg lying on the forest ground, willing herself to blend with the green. Through simple grace notes - photos from the previous summer of the boy's shoes put on the wrong feet, and, in one of several allusions to The Shining...