I’m a sucker for scandal. When the Daily Mail called for David Cronenberg’s Crash to be banned in 1996, I headed straight for the cinema. I bought a ticket, a bucket of salted popcorn and sat down salivating at the thought of 90 minutes of depravity, horror and mild-titillation. What I got was an hour-and-a-half of boredom: Oh look, James Spader is bonking Holly Hunter in a trashed Cadillac. Here’s Rosanna Arquette being rude in an iconic American motor. Repeated auto erotica, I discovered, gets tired quick.
Screwed: Don't expect to be scandalized
Crash should have taught me that when a director is determined to push back the boundaries of censorship, they inevitably sacrifice plot, character and dialogue for dumb shocks. But like I said, I’m a sucker for scandal. So as soon as the Mail started to decry Lars von Trier’s Antichrist for plumbing “new depths of sexual explicitness, excruciating violence and degradation” my outrage glands started to throb in anticipation. Mmm, delicious controversy.
If only. Sure, a dude’s Johnson pops up in the first couple of minutes and Charlotte Gainsbourg chops off her (clearly rubberised) genitalia. But more shocking than any of that physical brutality is the pseudo-psychological art house tosh that takes up most of the movie. Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe spend hours pontificating the evil of nature, and Lars von Trier uses tired cinematic tricks (Gasp! Black and white slow-mo with an opera soundtrack) last seen in a Calvin Klein perfume ad. The only interesting character (spoiler alert) is a sweaty, talking fox that appears halfway through the movie and grunts in his best James Earl Jones voice that, “Chaos reigns.” Oh, the fox is also eating his own guts when he makes this wise observation.
Basil Brush: Torture porn's new hero
Still, those colossal flaws haven’t stopped some contrarian critics (“It’s art,” they declare. “Lars is a genius”) fawning over this deeply dumb movie. Here are some of their most idiotic utterances:
“At one point, the woman hears a cry. It is, she says, “the cry of all things that are to die”. It’s tempting to laugh, just as we may well laugh when a fox faces the camera and intones, “Chaos reigns”. It’s a jaw-dropping moment, utterly absurd by the norms of ‘straight’ cinema and of modern society. And yet, throughout much of history, mankind has believed in talking animals and in beasts as truth-tellers. My laughter was tinged with a fear – that I was a fool to laugh.” -Sukhdev Sandhu, The Telegraph
“It is a symbolist’s dream, or at least nightmare, which must be traversed and experienced in order to move on – but instead of giving us somewhere to go, Von Trier takes us round in circles, until we too are trapped in the dark forest, sharing in the self-torments of these lost souls.” –Anton Bitel, Channel4.com
Gainsbourg: Crap in the woods
“This, essentially, is a snapshot of the Danish director’s Id taken, allegedly, during one of his darkest depressions. And as such it seems to offer the viewer a fundamental creative choice. We can scoff and dismiss it as the last gasp ravings of a deranged opportunist. Or we can look, unflinchingly, at Von Trier’s fantastically painful mirror and acknowledge the Id within us all.” -Kevin Maher, The Times
And finally, some sense:
“Lars von Trier cuts a big fat art-film fart with Antichrist.” -Todd McCarthy, Variety
