The players become substantial rather than dramatis personae. With Grief comes very palpable sorrow from both leads. At the end of the prologue, the next three chapters are heralded by three toy soldiers from the dead son’s toyroom, each appropriately named. The film is divided into six parts, including a Prologue (the lovemaking and death), Grief, Pain, and Despair The Three Beggars, and an Epilogue. She pictures the woods as symbolising her fear, and they both retreat to an ‘Eden’ – an isolated cabin surrounded by woods. In the trauma of bereavement, the psychotherapist asks his wife to visualise her worst nightmares in order to help her overcome them.
May sorrow break the bonds of my anguish, if only for pity’s sake.”) There is a very brief, aesthetically contextualised glimpse of penetration, setting the audience up for the psycho-sexual horrors that follow much later. Exquisite black and white photography captures water droplets in slow motion to Handel (translated, “Leave me to weep over my cruel fate and let me sigh for liberty. This opening prologue is operatic in its soundtrack and intensity. But instead of releasing psychological trauma, he reinforces it, until he has to defend himself when she becomes the controlling force.Ī psychotherapist (Willem Dafoe) and his wife (Charlotte Gainsbourg) are making love as their young toddler climbs onto a desk to look at snowflakes outside. A psychotherapist, with the best intentions, leads his wife into the darkest recesses of her mind. The narrative itself, such as there is one, follows a similar process. He locks the terrifying nature of his horror movie to the most extreme sexual images he can find. Instead of lashings of gore which can retrospectively be dismissed as ‘just more CGI’, von Trier seems to do exactly the opposite of what a Freudian psychotherapist would do in releasing obsessions. With Antichrist, although there are some standard jump-out-of-your-seat moments (I physically leapt about four inches at one point), the main horror element is a deep psychological manipulation that stays with you for days afterwards. (Inasmuch as this review is partly interpretative, other viewers may find their own preferred readings which differ from the approach given here.) This results both in adherents and in those who dismiss his work as pretentious – not something that ever seems to bother him. He makes films that provide himself and his audiences with thorny intellectual challenges. The point of this long preamble is a preparation to the statement that, if someone like von Trier makes a horror movie, it is hardly likely to be standard fare. One of the few uncontroversial films he has made is The Boss Of It All, an extremely clever comedy that didn’t receive much attention. More recently, he founded another experimental cinema called Advance Party. Somewhere along the line were experiments like The Five Obstructions, a featurette demonstrating a love of constraints in moviemaking, and two highly theatrical Brechtian pieces called Dogville and Manderlay, where sets are replaced with chalk lines. Next came Dancer In The Dark, an almost Janacek-like musical where a blind girl takes the inner fantasy world to extremes. Then he founded the Dogme movement of back-to-basics cinema, and made The Idiots, where lunacy and sanity are cleverly mixed. He initially came to fame through Breaking The Waves, a controversial story asking how far someone would go for love. Lars von Trier has established himself as a maker of serious, avant garde drama.
0 kommentar(er)
