Antichrist
review I Full
Cannes Film Festival coverage
Lars von Trier remained unrepentant yesterday over the storm that had engulfed
him in Cannes after the showing of his film Antichrist. The film has
attracted damning reviews (The Times awarded it one star out of five)
for scenes of wincing intensity in which a grieving couple, played by Willem
Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, mutilate each other after the death of their
child. (Avoid the rest of this paragraph if you’re of a sensitive
disposition.) Gainsbourg hits Dafoe so hard in the testicles with a plank of
wood that he lapses into a coma. He ejaculates blood when she masturbates
him. She drills a hole through his leg before tying him to a rock. But the
scene that has caused the most disquiet is the close-up of Gainsbourg’s
character cutting off her clitoris with a rusty pair of scissors.
Von Trier told The Times: “If the film is shocking that is a
side-effect. It was technically fun to play around with but it certainly
wasn’t the most important thing to me. In my opinion a film can never be too
graphic or shocking. I was not expecting the critical reaction here in
Cannes but I suppose that was naive of me. I tend to be more human in the
sense that I like people to like me.”
Von Trier’s film is not the first clitoral self-mutilation seen at Cannes.
This year’s president of the Official Competition Jury, Isabelle Huppert,
took a razor-blade to her privates in Michael Haneke’s prize-winning drama La
Pianiste in 2001. What has infuriated — indeed frightened — critics
about von Trier’s film is its alarming lack of rhyme or reason. The shocks
don’t have a context strong enough to excuse them. Another milestone has
been passed in the history of cinematic shocks — just when we thought we
were too jaded to be shocked, von Trier has raised the bar.
And not just him: Quentin Tarantino’s revisionist mash-up, Inglourious
Basterds, with its scene of Hitler’s face being blown off and a horrific
climax set in a cinema, also unsettled some critics — although with
Tarantino some controversy-courting is to be expected.
Von Trier said at a press conference that Antichrist “is a very dark
dream about guilt and sex and stuff. Not to show it \ would be lying. I
don’t think I have to excuse myself. You are all my guests. Not the other
way around. I’ve made this little film, that I’m rather fond of, for me. I
don’t think I owe anybody an explanation.” Whether Antichrist
will be seen uncensored in British cinemas is yet to be decided. Films are
viewed by The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) only when they
have a UK distributor, which Antichrist is yet to secure.
Films to have fallen foul of the BBFC, which was established in 1912, include The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and The Last House on the Left (1972),
both of which were banned outright. Rebel Without a Cause (1955) was
cut to avoid encouraging teen delinquency. Even Ingmar Bergman was a victim
of the censor’s scissors, losing some sexually explicit dialogue from Smiles
of a Summer Night (1955). The Wild One (1953) was also originally
banned, although the BBFC passed Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange (both
1971) for release.
The audience may have howled in disbelief at Antichrist’s closing dedication
to the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky. But the shock of the film has
arguably won it a huge amount of possibly lucrative attention. From now on
whatever critics say about its artistic ambition is neither here nor there.
People will queue up for the sensation. This is a troubling twilight zone.
Cinema has a matchless power to shock. It also has a duty to explore the
dark side of human nature, but where do you draw the line? There’s a rich
history of shocks that stretches all the way back to those quaint silent
movies of French prostitutes dressed as nuns that entertained middle-class
Parisians from the 1920s onwards. The history of cinema is littered with
moments when entire generations didn’t know where to look.
In the early days of silent films, pretty much everything was shocking. The
onscreen entertainment was linked in the audience’s minds to the off-screen
antics of the stars. Several widely publicised scandals in the 1920s (Fatty
Arbuckle’s manslaughter trial for his involvement in the death of the
actress Virginia Rappe; the murder of the director William Desmond Taylor;
several drug-related deaths) convinced the conservative American public that
the movie industry was populated by the dissolute and amoral dregs of
humanity.
Clara Bow shocked and delighted in equal measure. It (1927), the title
of which referred to Bow’s supposedly unavoidable erotic magnetism, caused
outrage within some sections of society, but it also made her a star. It
seems tame by today’s standards — but then in the 1920s nobody had a problem
with a white actor performing in black face (The Jazz Singer, 1927)
whereas today such a stunt would cause a sharp intake of breath.
The Hays Code, in force in America from 1930 to 1968, was introduced to
protect the American people from the pernicious corrupting influence of the
movie industry. Specific depiction of drug use was forbidden; sexual
perversity (for which read homosexuality); nudity or sexual dances outlawed;
excessive and lustful kissing was banned also; the flag of the United States
was to be treated with respect at all times. Effectively, the code cushioned
the American audience from shocks and arguably helped the industry to grow
into a family-friendly entertainment medium.
The films that shock a generation are a measure of the times. The drama about
interracial marriage, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? caused a
stir in 1967, which says a lot about the inherent racism in much of society
even in the liberated Sixties. The first English-language film to use the
word “homosexual”, Victim (1960), starring Dirk Bogarde
as a gay barrister, was highly controversial on its release in the UK and
was banned in the US. A restored print of the film screens in Cannes this
year in the Cannes Classics section. Other films, such as Todd Browning’s Freaks
(1932), a horror film about circus sideshow performers that featured
non-actors suffering from a grotesque array of physical deformities, is
almost as shocking now as it was then.
The debate about what’s acceptable in today’s cinema has raged since Marlon
Brando flung Maria Schneider face down and reached for the butter in Last
Tango in Paris (1972), breaking not just the taboo of showing sex on the
big screen but a sexual taboo as well: anal sex.
In the past decade the internet has been instrumental in inoculating us to
ever greater degrees of sex and violence. Images of beheadings, happy
slappings, “redneck” footage from the Gulf Wars and CCTV recordings have
been absorbed by cinema as greedily as the technology. Indeed The Blair
Witch Project (1999), born on the internet, was one of the most original
horror movies ever devised.
“Shocks are necessary, but they don’t have to be acceptable,” says Hamish
McAlpine, who has produced a number of causes célèbres himself,
including Michael Haneke’s remarkable frame-by-frame American remake of his
own Funny Games in 2007. And audiences were left reeling by the
nine-minute rape and murder of Alex (Monica Bellucci) in Gaspar Noé’s
terrifying film Irréversible in 2002.
The appetite for torture pornography in slasher flicks such as Eli Roth’s Hostel
(2005) is almost as horrifying as the BBFC’s refusal to censor any
gratuitous part of it. But there is a profound gulf between Hostel
and Irréversible in what they are trying to achieve, and their
intended audiences. Irréversible is a daring experiment with perception
and time. Hostel is as morally vacant and intellectually ambitious as those
famous old staples Emmanuelle (1974) and Deep Throat (1972).
Thinking cinema produces the greatest shocks. Brillante Mendoza’s Kinatay
— in competition at Cannes — features a prostitute who is stabbed and then
slowly dismembered for the rest of the film by a street gang. “When you
watch most horror films they are simply there to scare you,” says the
Filipino director. “You don’t experience the process. I want the audience to
know these horrors really exist. That’s the scariest part.”
Mendoza is eloquent proof that a decent shock is a deeply imperfect art. He is
also proof that there is no shortage of darker places to go. Directors
invited to Cannes will always test the outer limits of acceptable taste. In
this respect the cinema art of shock is still evolving. The trick is not
falling off the edge.
“The main reason for cutting a film is when a distributor wants to secure a
lower classification category,” says Sue Clark of the BBFC. “If the
distributor doesn’t want to cut the film we would suggest a higher
classification.” The BBFC has a board of 25 “examiners” drawn from many
different walks of life. Typically two watch each film and make their
adjudication.
In recent years, Clark says, the BBFC has veered away from censoring scenes of
extreme sex and violence. “Some pretty strong things have gone through with
an 18 certificate: Nine Songs, Shortbus. Everyone thought we
would cut the Irréversible rape scene, but we passed it. It was
shot with a single camera, it focused on the woman’s reaction, it wasn’t
titillating, it was ‘aversive’ — it left the viewer feeling uncomfortable,
the viewer wasn’t encouraged to find it funny. It wasn’t gratuitous.”
Whatever the bloody dismemberment in Antichrist and the certification
fate awaiting it should it be released in the UK, the shock-generating
potential of cinema looks set to remain uncurtailed.
