Word: trier
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...trailer for the film, put online earlier this year, stoked fears in von Trier 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...
...spent the previous summer with the boy while writing a thesis, never completed, on the medieval persecution of women as witches. From the midpoint on, as the director's plot summary tactfully puts it, "things go from bad to worse." Worse than you, or almost anyone but von Trier, could imagine...
...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...
...attack on her husband's sex organs, then her mutilation of her own - where you could hear "Oh, come on!" muttered in several languages. There's nothing wrong with a movie going crazy along with its characters, as we noted in our Thirst review two days ago, but von Trier doesn't have the craft to bring the moviegoer along in the most extreme parts of Antichrist. The thought was that we were being subject to the spectacle, not of a woman going mad, but of a director...
...Trier means to portray the woman's dangerous identity with the witches who were the subject of her thesis, and to argue that nature itself may be evil. ("Nature," the woman says, "is Satan's church.") What troubles even von Trier partisans is the connection this woman has with some of his other female protagonists. Emily Watson in Breaking the Waves, Bjork in Dancer in the Dark, Nicole Kidman in Dogville and Bryce Dallas Howard in Manderlay are all made to endure, at the rough hands of men, indignations that are depicted so long and lovingly that they seem like...