Full Cannes Festival Coverage

There’s always one film in the Cannes competition selection that seems calculated to outrage in the most cynical and manipulative way imaginable. This year, that film is Antichrist. Lars von Trier, we get it. You really, really don’t like women. The Danish arch-provocateur who challenged the movie world to get back to basics with the Dogme movement, and famously fell out with Bjork in the Palme d’Or-winning Dancer In The Dark, returns from a creative wilderness period resulting from a bout of chronic depression. He has described Antichrist, a melodramatic psychological horror film, as being a therapeutic and deeply personal piece of work – which suggests that there is a special circle of hell which exists solely in Lars von Trier’s head.

But the cynical might suggest that it’s not the work that von Trier finds so cathartic, but the attention that results from the shockingly graphic mutilations in the movie’s overwrought final act. It’s fair to say that one particular scene is easily the most controversial image ever to be screened in competition in Cannes. It’s calculated to affront and it does. So on that level at least the film must be considered a success.

Von Trier has moved away from the sparse, rough and ready work of the Dogme era and embraced a stylised and visually sumptuous look for Antichrist. The movie is packed with arresting and atmospheric images, some of which you’ll wish you could permanently erase from your memory.

If von Trier’s issues with female sexuality have been evident in previous films, particularly Breaking the Waves and Dogville, in Antichrist he ups the ante, constructing a gender war of nuclear intensity between a bereaved couple hoping to heal their wounds and their marriage in an isolated country retreat.

In a slow-motion black-and-white prologue, von Trier juxtaposes candid shots of the couple, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe, in the throes of sexual passion with the somewhat implausible accidental death of their son, occurring at the same time. Gainsbourg’s character blames herself – and it seems that von Trier agrees with her assessment.

There’s a puritanical undercurrent in his work that seems to want to punish women for being sexually active entities. This tendency reaches its apotheosis in Antichrist when (sensitive souls look away now) Gainsbourg takes a large pair of scissors to the most intimate and sensitive part of her sexual organs and chops it off.

And that’s not the only genital trauma in the movie. Earlier, during one of their bouts of joyless, anguished sex, she whacks him on the penis with a large plank of wood, before effectively getting the final word in the argument with a technique that Kathy Bates in Misery might have admired.

If the film were not so cold and emotionally uninvolving then the arty torture porn element might be more upsetting. But given how desperate to shock the film is, it’s surprising that long swathes of it are so turgidly dull. Von Trier cites Strindberg as a major influence and it’s true that the two characters feel less like a husband and wife than a pair of strangers in a rather stale and dated play. And the movie descends into the ridiculous with a zombie crow and a disembowelled fox in undergrowth which speaks the words, “Chaos reigns”.

It’s difficult to imagine where von Trier will go next in his career. A graphic onscreen clitorectomy is a tough act to follow. And I can’t imagine that actresses will be queuing up to work with him after this.

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