Film: "Antichrist" by Lars von Trier (2009)

It was only at the end of the film, when the end titles started to run, that I paid attention to the fact that the final "t" of "Antichrist" - the title of Lars von Trier's take on the horror genre - is written with the symbol for "woman". Of course by then it was redundant, as the film had steadily and progressively moved towards the re-affirmation of that old mysogynistic adage: Woman=Nature=Satan; at some point we see the male protagonist literally scribble this equation on a piece of paper where he tries to organise - and thus "cure" - his wife's "illness".



Yet, it does is to so cleverly, so beautifully, even, that for about three quarters of its length it had me fooled into believeing that von Trier was actually questioning the tradition of a genre where women are, by and large, both the victims of male violence and those responsible for causing it, mostly because of their sexuality (the slasher genre is basically founded on the idea that female sexual desire calls for punishment).

The film opens with a black and white prologue that runs the exact duration of Handel's "Lascia ch'io pianga", from his Rinaldo (an especially slow interpretation, it sould be stressed). It's a very stylised scene, played in extreme slow motion: while the Man and the Woman make love (one of the many explicit sex scenes Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg are said to have performed for real can be seen here), their little son climbs out of his bed, sees the snow outside the open window, and jumps to his death in an effort to grasp it.

The scene could be annoying for its prettification of a horrid moment, but the truth is that its excessive length, it's extreme slowness, and the fact that it allows the viewer to predict not only its outcome, but also the way it will be framed and presented in relation to the love-making scene, makes it a rather wonderful critique of how sex and death are often beautified in semi-art-house films. It allows the viewer to disengage completly from the horror of the child's death and to think of the many times we've seen the type of (easy) metaphors used to signify it, such as the imahe of a teddy bear falling into the snow.



So far so good.

Switch to colour.

This is when begins what I consider the best part of the film, one of incredible psychological tension and daring direction, clever, full of promise and possibilities.

The Woman is grief-stricken with guilt and sense of loss, and falls apart. The husband, a psychologist, decides that the therapy prescribed by a different doctor - one that includes antidepressants - is wrong, that she should face her grief and fears, and therefore takes upon himself to "cure" her.

In their little apartment of which we can only ever glimpse corners cut off the overall darkness, a tug of war between the Man who wants to "cure" his wife and the Woman who questions his need to control her, to control her emotions and fears, begins, and it's quite beautiful in its rawness: a very intriguing study of male/female relationshios, or of of any marriage, for that matter.

She wants to have sex, because it makes her forget her grief; first he refuses, as it would go against his therapy, only to give in to her desire. She accuses him of not feeling emotions for the loss of their son, of having distanced himself from them well before the tragedy. He reacts to her anger with a quiet calm that could be both coldness or deep heartbreak. The light is so low that at times we can only see the shadow of his face, but even when we see his expression, Dafoe (who - like Gainsbourg - is giving the performance of a lifetime) manages to emote in so many different directions at once that it's impossible to pin him down.

Then, against her wish, he takes her to their cabin in the woods (no electricity, to roads, no telephone, absolutely no way to communicate with the rest of the world), because apparently that's the place she fears the most in her nightmares, and, of course, she must face her fears!

The part in the woods is visually stunning: filmed almost always in natural light (except a few mental projections and memories), it's a tapestry of different shades of green which literally come alive: I don't know what is this technique and it's used very subtly, but it's as if the actual film (the physical thing) waved at the outer edges of the screen. I'm sure it's digitally produced, but it feels real.

This is when the horror kicks in. We find out that there's A Past. That the previous summer the Woman and her child were there alone while she was trying to write her thesis on the history of mysogyny that she never completed (title: "Gynocide"). Apparently, he found her topic "glib", but then he finds her old notes in the attic and understands that she might have internalised all the portrayals/history of women as witches, and thus come to accept that they deserve(d) to be "punished."

She might have heard voices, and - oh dear - even hurt their child during their stay (sans father), as proven by some photographs taken at the time, where he's wearing the left shoe on his right foot and vice-versa.

The forest is alive with the sound of acorns falling on the roof of the cabin (she suggests that it's the trees weeping, but he replies - in what is perhaps the most unwittingly funny line of the film - "Acorns don't cry: you know that!") He also encounters hurt animals, all female: a deer, a fox, a bird. The fox warns him against danger, in this scene that has already become - and deservingly so - one of the most parodied in the history of cinema:



When the Man tries to explain to his wife that no, women don't really deserve to be beaten and killed, we believe for a moment that the film might actually lead to a definitive revelation/deconstruction of that staple diet of the genre: the bruised and murdered female body, the high-pitch of a woman screaming in fear.

Alas, it turns out that she really is that evil, whether because she's internalised the patriarchal discourse or because she's Nature" incontrollable and sex-crazed, it makes no difference to her. Unable to accept that he might leave her, she hurts him horribly, symbolically screwing a grindstone into his leg, proceeding then to raps him, and finally, force him into a showdown where he must, you see, kill her: violently, hatefully, graphically.

For closure, he burns her body in a pyre, the ashes becoming part of the forest that hides the many women that have been murdered there through the centuries. There's a final, rather obscure scene where the ghosts of the women in the forest walk towards him in a conciliatory mood, as "Lascia ch'io pianga" plays again in the background. But these women are all faceless (the faces are literally erased through blurring), and it's too little, too late, compared to the horrors of the female protagonist's own genital self-mutilation, her bulging eyes as she dies by her husband's hand.

Cured indeed.

Another cut, beaten, lifeless female body in the fine tradition of the genre.