Translated material
Trier therapy
“Antichrist” is coming to Moscow screens
There is so much nonsense surrounding this film that I just want to tell you how it was made. This picture consists of a prologue, an epilogue and four chapters: the first is called “Sorrow”, the second is called “Pain”, followed by “Femicide” and “Three Monks”. The three monks in the medieval legend represent sorrow, pain and despair, followed by death.There are two heroes - husband and wife. The wife is studying the history of the Inquisition, the topic of her dissertation is the attitude of the church towards woman and female nature as a vessel of sin, as a primarily carnal being through which the devil comes into the world. For which thousands of women were burned at the stake during the humanistic Renaissance. She was immersed in the space of these concepts that summer that she spent alone with her child in a secluded forest house. There she began to slowly go crazy, as her husband finds out a year later, when they find themselves in this house again - after the tragic death of their child.
However, the viewer doesn’t know any of this when he starts watching the film and sees two people, in rapid-fire photography, intertwining fierce embraces to the music of Handel, while their baby, waking up, crawls out of the crib and stands on the windowsill. Outside the window, snow is quietly falling, a man and a woman reach the climax of passion, slowly raising their hands up, as if soaring in the air, a little boy is flying... The viewer does not see his fall, but everyone has an imagination. The prologue is over.
The first symptom that this is not a story of a mother’s grief over her lost son is in the very first dialogue, when the wife (Charlotte Gainsbourg, Cannes prize for best actress), forced to stay in the clinic due to depression, tells her husband that, in her opinion, attending physician, she has “atypical grief.” The husband (William Dafoe, who played Christ in Martin Scorsese's film), a professional psychotherapist, self-confidently believes that he knows his wife better and can help her. Here you need to be careful and make a note of it as a memory - the roles have been distributed: a patient and rationally thinking man will now consistently explore the confused and sick soul of his wife, returning her, as it seems to him, to normal and, as the viewer soon understands, to the hidden in her the forces of the subconscious. In search of the cause of his wife's panic attacks, the husband gets to the bottom of the source of her fears; here for the first time the word Eden is heard, which means a certain forest and a secluded house there, where the family usually spends their holidays.
If before this it was still possible to think that this was a psychological drama in the spirit of Bergman, then after the appearance of Eden it is already completely clear - the action leaves the limits of life-likeness. Trier always stylizes some genre... Either a musical, or a melodrama, or a theatrical performance. Here he took as a basis the guignol - a super-bloody and hyper-realistic, but fundamentally comic performance, where the terrible in the process of exploration turns out to be a trick, an attraction... Only instead of the theatrical convention that persists in the most naturalistic performance, Trier unfolds his performance with the most realistic of illusions It’s rare to see flesh so shamelessly and fearlessly on screen.
However, oddly enough, Trier spares the viewer by not directly demonstrating almost any action - almost always the camera manages to divert the viewer’s gaze from self-mutilation or looking at another abomination, but the hint is made, and the hint is so strong that it is more than enough for the viewer. Trier is unnaturalistic; the documentary style of filming that is accepted today is combined in his film with an exquisite Gothic style of image. The forest, the house, the grass, the trees, and the bodies of people - everything is masterfully stylized to resemble ancient engravings, or even rather, our idea of ancient engravings.
A man tries to be reasonable - he builds a system for healing his wife in advance, he makes a diagnosis, clarifies it, analyzes the nuances and finally achieves a result: the woman feels free, the fear lets her go, but then it turns out that all these fears, tears , pain (the heavy shackles of culture) hid the abyss of madness. The mind-nature antinomy is presented in the film too clearly to be taken seriously. Although, of course, Trier is interested in understanding what depression hides, what lies behind depression and unwillingness to live, how the psyche hides aggression...
Who is the hero and who is the victim in this film? The question is controversial. It seems to me that Trier is more interested in a man, that his role is the main one. When the husband realizes that his wife has long been out of her mind, the floodgates have already been opened, and violence remains the only form of defense, the clinical diagnosis - self-hatred, directed first at others - is absolutely clearly demonstrated. When the husband writes the treasured answer on top of the pyramid of his wife’s fears, it’s already too late. Demons are on the loose.
But spectators, captivated by the development of events, forget that this is not the real story of a married couple. A fox, a crow, a doe appear so that the symbolic meaning of what is happening is not forgotten. We see a parable about a man in Eden, the Garden of Eden, where the Fall took place, temptation came from Eve, man fell, and suffering, pain and death came into the world.
Another director would have limited himself to this. But not Trier. This is too easy for him, he teases the viewer, playing on his nerves, pinching them without paying attention to plausibility, bringing the torment of the heroes to complete profanation. Laughter arises in the hall, but it would be foolish to think that Trier at that moment was hoping to hear sobs. This most technologically advanced of manipulators knows how to press the buttons of human emotions, and if he wanted to make you seriously think about whether the devil really rules the world, you would think like a cute...
It is much more interesting to understand why Trier needs all this bloody circus. At the Grand Guignol theater at the dawn of the Art Nouveau era, experiments on human nature were part of the mandatory program for studying the world. Today, the time for serious experimentation has passed, and it seems to me that Trier just wants to entertain himself and us by demonstrating how far cinema can go. If you like, cinema is the antichrist, because it allows you to see what should not be seen.