Lars Von Trier's Anti-Christ

Trailer:

http://vimeo.com/4062746

Charlotte Gainsbourg and William Dafoe, late Summer 2009.

Wiki

it's "Willem"

Sorry, Lars Von Trier makes me cranky

fantastic

I don't know, premise and actors are great, but LVT makes me skeptical

Sorry, Lars Von Trier makes me cranky
^^^
me too

sounds promising, but I haven't really paid too much attention to him since that ridiculously shitty Bjork movie

All LVT haters need to watch Riget, it fully redeems him of all shitty things he has done since.

Also, I am very excited for Anti-Christ.

I do apologize, that's the first time ever I noticed he's not called William. :-(

xp Shakey: too bad. The last one - Boss of it All was pretty great - more in the vein of The Idiots. I like almost everything else he did, except for that Bjork movie which made me fall asleep.

lars von trier fucking sucks guys.

Actually I've only really ever seen Breaking the Waves, which was really good. I may have seen the bjork movie too, and hated it, I can't remember.

Willem Defoe was born with the name "William" but he changed it because he is crazy.

Von Trier does not suck, and this looks very interesting. I love Dafoe.

I don't understand his whole hatred-for-women thing but I will kind of always give him a pass because of the Kingdom and because of the loopy Dogme 95 manifesto. I am always amused by artists with manifestos.

sounds promising, but I haven't really paid too much attention to him since that ridiculously shitty Bjork movie

The same with me. He may be technically talented, but after Idiots and DITD I decided his brand of emotional torture porn isn't for me.

any doubts i had about von trier--and he has certainly done some bad shit--were erased by the five obstructions, totally amazing movie. i liked dogville too.

i think his larger-than-life tuxedo-clad train-jumping manifesto-spouting media personality is pretty awesome too

Really excited for this - The Kingdom proved he can do horror, so it's nice to see him returning to it.

yeah five obstructions ws rad, hi5 slocki

xp Shakey: yeah, the Bjork movie struck me as part of a misogyny trilogy that began with Breaking the Waves and also included Dogville. Though his brutality/humiliation of his lead characters isn't restricted to women - cf Zentropa/Europa and Five Obstructions. The Idiots didn't imply a hatred of women - to me - more a dislike for poseurs or a certain category of artists.

Dancer as misogyny? No.

because he is crazy

more likely it was a SAG Name conflict, but that also qualifies as crazy

Dancer as misogyny? No.

oh absolutely. how else to explain a series of movies that all hinge on the abject abuse and degradation of their central female characters...? This is a pretty common criticism of Von Trier ("torture porn" isn't far off the mark, even though that attribution is usually reserved for more trad 00s horror fare)

Haven't seen the 5 Obstructions, will look into it...

Really appreciated what he was up to after watching Five Obstructions, don't think his films are direct expressions of any of his beliefs, misogyny or anything, more like sort of patronising aggressive therapy for his audience. Looks like this is pretty astute and funny.

The thing is - a lot of his films hinge on the abject abuse and degradation of their central characters - whether they're male or female. The first Von Trier film I saw was Breaking the Waves and I almost wrote him off as a director for that one because of the misogyny, but then I watched other films where the central character was male, and they got the same treatment. Dude's just misanthropic - with degradation and abuse of central character used to get at his real target - the audience.

i dont see how that really follows.

and 5 obstructions is so not like that, it's a really compassionate movie, not to give away the ending, but i don't see how you could watch that film and come away with the idea that lvt is trying to degrade the main character.

I don't think he's nec. misanthropic, but he is suspicious of the way people empathise with characters. I think he's using a different model of catharsis. Five Obstructions was so good because he was so honest.

lars von trier fucking sucks guys.

― FREE DOM AND ETHAN (special guest stars mark bronson), Tuesday, April 14, 2009 12:02 PM

no wai i loved 'the idiots'

i really like the idiots, and riget is often very funny

and i like the pranksterism of the dogme manifesto (they wrote it in 30 minutes while getting drunk). i don't really "agree" with it but i don't really agree with most manifestos either

Five Obstructions is good, but kinda zzzz in the middle stretch.

His female characters often turn out to be pretty strong through everything though, or sometimes they snap and get revenge on their tormentors. Either way I think we're meant to think of them as inspiring survivors instead of victims, moreso than a lot of his male characters anyway.

In retrospect, DitD probably was a pile of crap, but I still think highly of Breaking the Waves and Dogville.

i dont see how that really follows.

and 5 obstructions is so not like that, it's a really compassionate movie, not to give away the ending, but i don't see how you could watch that film and come away with the idea that lvt is trying to degrade the main character.

― s1ocki, Tuesday, April 14, 2009 11:54 AM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i need to reesreeen this; funny i think i agree with you but my conclusion was basically the opposite. it's clear LVT loves Leth dearly but still has basically no self-recognition. he's totally invested in the idea of himself as some kind of torturer-therapist and that never comes in to question. like, who the fuck are YOU maaaan!?

I really loved Dogville, like it depressed the shit out of me for days.

Actually, I tend to like his movies incrementally more than I think I'm going to, but appreciate them retroactively not that much.

Brian Fantana: I think I was in love once.
Ron Burgundy: Really? What was her name?
Brian Fantana: I don't remember.
Ron Burgundy: That's not a good start, but keep going.
Brian Fantana: She was Brazilian, or Chinese, or something weird. I met her in the bathroom of a K-Mart and we made out for hours. Then we parted ways, never to see each other again.
Ron Burgundy: I'm pretty sure that's not love.
Brian Fantana: Damn it.

Von Trier is currently working on a film entitled Dimension which is a project that spans 30 years. Every year the cast and crew (including Udo) meet to shoot footage. The film will show the actors age 30 years without make-up or special effects. Approximately seen years of footage has already been shot. The premiere will take place in 2024!

(source: Udo Kier's bio @ imdb.com) (Should have started the "Anticipating Lars Von Trier's Dimension (2024)" thread?)

http://www.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idUSTRE54G2JF20090517

(can't wait)

Von Trier film that shocks critics non-shocker :)

(we neither!)

(wme neither!)

* Xan Brooks

The horror! The horror! Scene from Lars von Trier's Antichrist

"Chaos reigns," declares a mangy fox about midway through Lars von Trier's Antichrist. The audience guffaws and then – whoops – we are pitched headlong into the abyss. Until then I'd been standing toe-to-toe with the film, which casts Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe as a bereaved couple going off the rails at their shack in the woods. But after that I'm senseless; my thoughts in tatters. There are squawking crows and pitch-black holes and an abattoir's worth of mutilation that I could only peer at through splayed fingers.

Chaos reigns. I stumble out in a daze, momentarily unsure whether I loved it or loathed it. Abruptly I realise that I love it. Von Trier has slapped Cannes with an astonishing, extraordinary picture – shocking and comical; a funhouse of terrors (of primal nature, of female sexuality) that rattles the bones and fizzes the blood before bowing out with a presumptuous dedication to Andrei Tarkovsky that had sections of the crowd hooting in fury.

screendaily makes it sound like the same old same old, which i can easily believe.

"Antichrist is Lars Von Trier at his most provocative. There doesn’t seem to be a genuinely-felt sentiment in it, apart from the conviction that women are the root of all evil - not something he hints at subtly, but clubs the viewer around the head with. Cannes gives Von Trier the oxygen of publicity and Antichrist will draw thousands of irate rants, and, later, a rehabilitation when some declare they love it after all.

Preposterous, but probably destined to become a cult horror ticket - it is well made and, at times, genuinely horrific - Antichrist stars a oft-naked, sexually rapacious Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe as a couple whose toddler child falls to his death from an open window in the prologue. They’re having sex as the accident happens, and Von Trier cuts from the child’s face mid-fall to Gainsbourg’s mid-orgasm, which pretty much sets the tone for the picture. Dafoe, a controlling psychologist, decides to treat Gainsboug’s “a-typical grief” himself.

This leads the couple to a forest retreat called Eden, an evil place where Gainsbourg starts to really lose the plot. Much will be made of a female circumcision sequence and there is beaucoup de female masturbation. Gainsbourg seems to mislay her pants at a certain point and spends the rest of the movie rampaging around the forest naked from the waist down while Dafoe is mutilated a la Misery- and that’s after she charges his erect penis with something akin to a battering ram. Other highlights include a talking fox."

sounds great!

This makes it sound like the worst thing in the history of bad things, ever:

http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/2009/05/antichrist_fart.php

Ebert's seen it too (maybe a little too many spoilers in there, don't know)

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/05/for_even_now_already_is_it_in.html

I just wanted to add that I really loved The Five Obstructions, the only LVT-associated thing I've ever enjoyed.

Director's Confession http://www.antichristthemovie.com/?p=277&language=en

He also told the media, “I am the best film director in the world, and all the others are overrated”, though he later downplayed it a little bit by saying that “all filmmakers think so about themselves but say it out, but I do”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y2qrXMUWGA

wau @ this movie

it has really stayed in my mind over the past few days. i think i wanna see it again (and on a big screen).

yeah, i DEFINITELY want to see this in a theater. i'm not even sure how much i liked it, but i still want to drink it in.

yeah u really should

on ifc on demand starting tomorrow (10/21), apparently

orly?

anthony lane is befuddled. i think he's right to ignore the three-beggars symbology as a red herring -- or at best a personal directorial idiosyncrasy -- but i don't think the central allegory is really as hard to parse as he's making it out to be.

Watching this movie was like an endurance trial. I got physically ill at one point and nearly had to stop to go lie down to stop my head from spinning. While I watched it on my computer I felt simultaneously attracted to and horrified by the idea of viewing it in a theater. This may be the only film I have ever seen that I liked and yet would never ever recommend to anyone.

I liked the bit about the shoes.

the shoes was the detail that i had most trouble working into the broader scheme/theme of the movie. i kept puzzling over what it signified and finally gave up. it was creepy, maybe that was its only purpose.

have never before liked anything by Von Trier, but this is probably the best film i've seen this year - the dedication to Tarkovsky apart, it reminded me most of some of Bergman's more gothic semi-horror movies, HOUR OF THE WOLF especially, but also VIRGIN SPRING (the template for LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT), PERSONA (also dominated by, and dependent on, two excellent performers), CRIES AND WHISPERS (w/ which it shares a horrible scene of genital mutilation) etc.

― Ward Fowler, Sunday, 30 August 2009 16:37 (1 month ago) Bookmark

def owes as much to bergman as it does to tarkovski

it's finally actually ON on demand. i feel like my mouth was hanging open for the last 40 minutes. im glad to have seen it but i really dont think i need to see it in a theatre, or ever again

it is really beautifully shot, though. lots of the images in nature, esp the mind-picture ones She imagines on the train are nearly painterly, reminded me of Apichatpong Weerasethakul stuff. agree the opening is fantastic, jeez. i immediately watched the prologue again as soon as it ended

can barely conceive of like the mechanics of shooting some of those scenes

He's such a hard to parse filmmaker, sort of like Neil LaBute, both of whom consistently provide lots of red meat to critics of their misogyny/misanthropy even as they deny offering it. At least Von Trier had a handful of genre films he made (Kingdom, Europa, Element of Crime) before he went all Dogme and off the deep end. I find LaBute a lot easier to dismiss, though, even if "In the Company of Men" is better and less intellectually facile/offensive than Von Trier's films. I've seen no evidence that LaBute is a good filmmaker. Von Trier, on the other hand, is formidable, if erratic.

yea labute is easier to dismiss, as is haneke imo; von trier is intriguing enough where hes earned [some] endulgances in my book

Yeah, Haneke is way too smug about his bad vibes.

is it just me, or did the prologue with the kid falling out the window look/feel kinda like an advertisement for some luxury product?

"perfume commercial" was what entered my mind

i forgot 2 say, u can see the kid's shoes in that first scene ~ i took that detail as some hint at an underlying mental sickness in Her character

i guess. there's so much potential symbolism in putting shoes on the wrong feet that it sort of seemed significant on some level other than just random cruelty -- but it may be a mistake to read too much into the movie's symbolic scheme.

"perfume commercial" was what entered my mind

yes! jewelry was my other thought.

parts of the movie really feel like von trier's taking the piss but somehow it works

I loved it. And I definitely would say anything that seems vague or subtle is probably in your imagination. This seems like one of the most overt films ever.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2678/4078122071_6cd19337ef.jpg

A+

lool'd

oh my god, is there any way I could get a super hi-res version of that to print and place in my video store? it would make a whole lot of us so very happy.

the largest one they have is 665 x 1024 http://www.flickr.com/photos/samsmyth/4078122071/sizes/l/

Simon = future Tarantino?

ha there's about six more likely candidates where I work

SPOILER

whats the significance of the epilogue? he turns around and sees the 3 animals again and then women start climbing and surrounding him - who are they and is it implied that they kill him (since when you see those 3 animals, someone dies). guessing they were executed witches, since thats what her thesis was on

SPOILER

anyway dope movie, i wanna see it again

http://www.movieline.com/images/chaos_reigns_fox.jpg

lol

SPOILER

whats the significance of the epilogue?

i thought the women at the end were basically a vision of nature -- since in the scheme of the movie women represent nature ("satan's church"), the engine of birth and death etc. and of course his killing her was a futile gesture, nature is in and around everything and will always triumph over reason. chaos reigns.

sort of simple-minded, obv., but the strength of the movie is much more in its execution and depth of feeling than in its ideas.

(so in that sense you could say the women kill him, since by bringing life into the world they simultaneously condemn it to death. that's the movie's central terror. )

ok yea that sounds about right

ok so this is on netflix on demand.

pretty WOW. don't know what to make of it right now.

i was just saying to a friend yesterday that this is the movie i remember most from last year. which is not the same as saying it's the best thing i saw last year, but it did leave an impression.

This film was great! The most offensive thing in the whole DVD is the idiot from the Daily Mail demanding von Trier justify his making of the movie.

http://manilovefilms.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/CinCapsJediGhosts.jpg

The most offensive thing in the whole DVD is the idiot from the Daily Mail demanding von Trier justify his making of the movie.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1200742/CHRISTOPHER-HART-What-DOES-film-banned-days.html

love the plot description in this because it gets nowhere NEAR how graphic and crazy it is.

Considering showing this and 'Possession' as a double-header at one of our Film Club gatherings. Not sure they'd actually compleement each other that well though. Would have to do 'Antichrist' first I think as well. Hmm.

hated this

Didn't totally adore it but appreciated it for being pretty unique and hard to forget

Is there a Melancholia thread? Just saw it the other night, and I loved it.

I plan on seeing it but haven't yet. friend of mine saw it at the Castro theater and said he laughed through tons of it, which was um an atypical reaction in terms of the rest of the audience

was shown this the other day. it's a fairly remarkable work - i had expected to hate von trier, but the balance of empathy is almost entirely with gainsbourg's character here. put crudely, the film is about how dafoe's character fundamentally misunderstands, mistreats and patronises her to the point of rejecting her desires for intimacy, her nature, her need to be loved rather than treated like an unexploded bomb - until she does explode - and then he kills her. an allegory for how men have treated women since time immemorial. he is almost too awful in his obtuseness - but this is what men are, all too often, when confronted by female anguish.

the issue of the shoes, placed on the wrong feet - this is the toughest part to explain within that narrative - i suppose that von trier is attempting to demonstrate that people (especially women?) can be irrational & operate under logics contrary to the (nefarious) scientific method which dafoe wields so fatally - this is a sympathetic reading, perhaps, but at no point in the film did i feel my misogyny sensors (insofar as i'm 'allowed' them) beeping - it really did feel like it was on gainsbourg's side (while retaining some small empathy for dafoe, the pedantic fool)

it reminded me of how technically skilled and imaginative he is. people getting worked up over his narratives tend to overlook or underplay how well he uses light, sound and editing. there are things in antichrist that really don't look like anything else i've seen.

― flying squid attack (tipsy mothra), Friday, September 18, 2009 2:14 PM (5 years ago)

agree w/this. i rate this film pretty highly even though i don't think i could ever explain what exactly LVT was trying to say with it, or whether it even means anything at all, but it's just an incredibly beautiful and unique film just on a surface, sense-oriented level. the only recent film that stuck with me for similar reasons was 'under the skin.'

this film and melancholia are masterpieces. shame about nymphomaniac.

i'm going to have all three hurled at me before too long! delightfully intense opening gambit

But Nymphomaniac (director's cut) is the best one of the three! Again, technical things, editing especially, but also the beautiful images of trees or hospital rooms or genitalia (joke). And just the whole rambling construction, all 5½ hours of it, with digression upon digression. Nobody does shit like this. Anymore.

I showed the first seven minutes in my film class. A couple of open-mouthed responses. I'd forgotten about the close-up of Willem Dafoe (or his body double's)'s meat.