Additionally, the film being discussed here is extremely graphic in nature, and some of these graphic moments are explored in this article.The links to the subsequent pages often get hidden near the bottom of the page, so just know that the article does not end at the bottom of this page.Instead, he aims to lead the life of a convalescent, pottering gently around his garden.Samantha Morton, Gillian Wearing and other women artists and academics give their opinion of the Danish directors provocative new film Antichrist starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg.
Photograph: Artificial Eye Antichrist starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg. Photograph: Artificial Eye Xan Brooks XanBrooks Wed 15 Jul 2009 20.05 EDT T he opening title arrives as a provocation, a mission statement. Over the years the international press has grown accustomed to the antics of the puckish Dane. This, after all, is the man who once dumped his festival prize in a dustbin, who dragged Nicole Kidman through the wringer in Dogville and provoked hoots of outrage when he won the Palme dOr for his death row musical, Dancer In The Dark. And yet nothing but nothing could prepare us for the film that followed. Antichrist opens, simultaneously, with a blaze of unsimulated sex and the death (simulated, one hopes) of a child, who topples from an upstairs window and cannons into the snow below. Bedevilled by guilt, his unnamed parents He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) retreat to a cabin in the woods called Eden. Oppressive Defoe winds up hobbled and impotent, while Gainsbourg runs clean off the rails and starts hacking at her own genitals with a pair of scissors. Sitting in the dark of the Cannes Palais, the audience yelped and howled and covered their eyes. Legend has it that at least four viewers fainted dead away in their seats. Antichrist provided the one bona-fide scandal of this years festival. While Gainsbourg eventually went on to win the best actress award, the director was barracked at the official press conference and the reviews, by and large, were incandescent. Antichrist was accused of rampant misogyny; of being an abomination; easily one of the biggest debacles in Cannes film history. For the critics at Time magazine, the film presented the spectacle of a director going mad. As it happens, there may be some truth to this last accusation. Small wonder, then, that the finished product is so torrid and unrefined, frequently preposterous and on the brink of outright meltdown. One might even argue that these very qualities are what make it so electrifying. Is Antichrist a misogynistic movie That, inevitably, is in the eye of the beholder. But does a fear of femaleness automatically equate to hatred Im not convinced that it does. Yes, the She character is anguished and irrational; a danger to herself and those around her. And yet for all that, she proves more vital, more powerful, and oddly more charismatic than He, the arrogant, doomed advocate of order and reason. Reason, the director implies, is a paltry defence against elemental forces. ![]()
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