Slog
News & ArtsThursday, October 29, 2009
Film This Week in Film: Antichrist
Posted by Lindy West on Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 12:45 PM
Jon Frosch is less than impressed:
Danish provocateur Lars von Trier has staged some sadistic bits of filmmaking in his time. Little blind Björk hanged at the end of Dancer in the Dark. Lovely Nicole Kidman raped in Dogville. Every excruciating minute of Manderlay. But the opening sequence of his new movie, Antichrist, which screened to gasps, guffaws, and a dry heave or two at Cannes last May, makes his previous work look like a Sunday stroll. Shot in voluptuous black-and-white slo-mo and set to a gorgeous Handel aria, von Trier shows us a couple—Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, named in the credits as "He" and "She"—having shower sex (cue close-up of anal penetration). It looks like some kind of sumptuous pornographic perfume commercial... until the director cuts to the couple's toddler jumping off a several- story-high window ledge. Never one for subtlety, von Trier films the kid's fluffy brown teddy bear hitting the snow-covered ground—just in case we missed the tragedy in an innocent child falling to his death.
Read and comment on the whole thing HERE.
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