‘Antichrist’ is the comic masterpiece of a con artist mocking fans of high culture
Is Antichrist, the new film from Lars von Trier, a comedy? At first glance, that seems like a ludicrous suggestion. It contains some of the most disturbing images I’ve ever seen in the cinema, including a scene in which Charlotte Gainsbourg performs a clitoridectomy on herself. How could anyone describe such a film as a comedy?
Certainly, von Trier has given no hint that Antichrist is intended to be funny. In the production notes he has written a ‘confession’ in which he claims to have produced the script as a form of therapy after a bout of depression. ‘Scenes were added for no reason,’ he says. ‘Images were composed free of logic or dramatic thinking.’ To anyone who has seen the film, this will come as no great surprise. But the passage that really jumps out is the following: ‘The script was finished and filmed without much enthusiasm, made as it was using about half of my physical and intellectual capacity.’
This isn’t a ‘confession’ so much as a typical bit of bravado — a two-fingered salute to those Hollywood hacks who feel obliged to promote their films. In effect, von Trier is telling us that he is far too grand to get involved in the marketing side of the business, even though this statement is included in a document that has been produced for the purposes of marketing the film. I’m no genius, as von Trier claims to be, but it seems clear that such Olympian insouciance is a form of branding, a way of conveying that he is an artist and that Antichrist is a work of art. It is a direct appeal — a ‘pitch’, if you will — to all those high-minded souls who loathe and detest the American entertainment industry and rank films according to how aggressively non-commercial they are.
At first, I assumed that the ‘difficult’ scenes in Antichrist were included for the same purpose. Von Trier wants to get it across that he has nothing but contempt for the audience — a hallmark of a great artist. Heaven forbid that his fans should think of him as courting their approval — and, of course, this is a clever way of courting their approval since they share his disdain for more user-friendly forms of entertainment. I was convinced that the purpose of these scenes, like so much else in Antichrist, is to hoodwink the audience into thinking they’re watching a rarefied piece of art. (Other telltale signs include black-and-white photography, the liberal use of slow motion and Handel on the soundtrack.)
The real brilliance of von Trier, I concluded, is that he is a salesman who has perfected the art of selling to people who have a visceral dislike of salesmen. Antichrist may be little more than a vial of snake oil, but von Trier certainly knows how to put one over on fans of high culture. He is an artist, all right — a con artist with a gift for self-promotion. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, he has put his talent into his work and his genius into his career.
But on further reflection it dawned on me that I, too, was guilty of taking the director at face value — or, at least, not peeling away enough layers. Antichrist is so transparently making a cynical bid for art-house approval that it cannot possibly succeed on that level and, not surprisingly, it hasn’t. At Cannes, it was met with jeers and catcalls and nearly every French film critic gave it a bad review. The most charitable explanation that fans of von Trier’s could come up with is that the director had gone mad.
I now think that the reason it was received so badly at Cannes — and has been so roundly condemned by the majority of highbrow critics — is that it is intended as a pastiche of European art house cinema. Antichrist is not so much an attempt to court the cultural snobs who revere these sorts of movies as a giant raspberry blown in their faces. Indeed, it is so over the top — so laboured, so tedious, so achingly pretentious — how could it be anything else? The giveaway is in the film’s final frame: a dedication to Andrei Tarkovsky, the Russian director whose films enjoy a legendary status among cinephiles. Forget the tabloid outrage and the demands for it to be banned. Antichrist is one of the funniest films of the year.
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