Interview

After the New York Film Festival screening of Lars von Trier's Antichrist, which opens tomorrow in New York, the director did a Q&A session with the audience via Skype.  His dour, bespectacled head was projected, thirty feet tall, on the same screen that had just featured Charlotte Gainsbourg snipping off her clitoris with a pair of scissors. (PHOTO: ANTICHRIST)

One reporter asked about the Biblical references in the film. Why is the cabin to which the two main characters retreat while coping with the death of their son called Eden? Von Trier sighed. No good reason, he said. He'd simply been "relatively uncritical" while editing the screenplay he'd written. "Normally I would have gone through the script and taken all that shit out."

Antichrist is, as you may have heard after the film was notoriously jeered at Cannes, a film about an unnamed husband and wife (She and He, played by Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe) whose child falls out the window while they're having athletic sex in various places and positions all over their apartment. That one of the opening shots of the film is a graphic, stylish image of a penis thrusting into a vagina (Gainsbourg's body double is credited as one "Mandy Starship") tells you that von Trier intends to shock.

And so he does. Dafoe's character, a therapist, tries some ill-advised role-playing with his wife to help her deal with her grief.  She is afraid of the woods, so he takes her to their cabin there–in "Eden." She spent the previous summer at the cabin with their son, working on but not finishing her thesis, which was, ominously, about "gynocide." The role-playing doesn't go well, and she knocks him out, smashes his testicles, and drills a hole in his leg to attach him to a large stone so that he can't get away. More bad things follow, culminating in the aforementioned thing with the scissors, which is unpleasant. The cinematography is gorgeous.

Not many films teeter so precariously between the unintentionally hilarious and the horrific. The prologue with the son's death is so ludicrous, with the lush B&W photography and slow-motion and Handel soundtrack, that it seems to court mockery. But the slow-motion images of Gainsbourg entering Eden are beautiful, eerie, memorable. 

Most indelibly absurd are the scenes involving Dafoe's Animal Friends, a deer, a crow, and a fox that repeatedly appear to him as harbingers of catastrophe. The crow squawks even when bludgeoned repeatedly with a rock. The deer prances about with a dead fetus hanging from its hindquarters. And the fox remarks to Dafoe, in Satan's voice, "CHAOS REIGNS." Really.

Von Trier was funny and frank in the New York Film Festival Q&A. He said that he didn't know what much of the film was about and that some of it hadn't turned out as he had intended. He'd made it as a kind of therapy during a time when he was depressed. That makes sense.