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TORONTO — Strange timing: With hordes of moviegoers turning out this month for the minimalist, gore-free “Paranormal Activity,” along comes Danish provocateur Lars von Trier, delivering unto the art-house and video-on-demand marketplace a film that is maximalist, not minimalist; laced with images of outlandish cruelty and violence; and a cinematic “scream” (the writer-director’s word) produced by an artist in the grip of a crippling depression, whose nightmarish scenes from a marriage would make Freud, Jung and August Strindberg weep.
“Antichrist” stars Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as characters known only as He and She. In the prologue, which von Trier shoots in deceptively beautiful black and white and in extreme slow motion, Dafoe and Gainsbourg make love in the shower while their son in the next room, no longer sleeping, totters up to the window — it is snowing outside — and plummets to his death. The rest of the film, which is unrated but ventures fully into NC-17 territory, finds Gainsbourg’s character trying to claw her way out of a well of grief. Dafoe’s character is a therapist and as bad as the idea seems, he takes charge of her recovery, as the couple retreats to their woodland cabin.
Then things start getting difficult, and if unblinking genital mutilation constitutes an automatic “no” in your movie-going life, then you probably won’t be taking a chance on “Antichrist.”
When it comes to warning an audience about what they’re in for with von Trier’s feverish creation, you really can’t win on that score, Dafoe said last month during the Toronto International Film Festival. “Warn them too much, people are like, ‘Well, I survived that. That wasn’t so bad.’ Fail to warn them properly, they’re like ‘Why didn’t someone tell me I was going to see that?’
“Look. The film has some very extreme moments, and I think they are important. They’re little slaps in the face to wake you up. The movie is pretty unrelenting, and it’s really not about ‘how it’s going to end,’ or where the story’s leading. There are things in it that are very beautiful, and there are things I can’t explain.”
For example: Right around the time the unruly natural world begins to bend Gainsbourg’s character to its unholy will, a fox appears and turns its head to the camera and utters the line: “Chaos reigns.”
“Each time I see it,” Dafoe said, smiling, “my interest shifts to different parts. Sometimes I’m more with her character. Sometimes I’m more with him. And sometimes, you know, I’m more with the fox.”
Dafoe, 54, hails from Appleton, Wis. His theatrical training and experience served him well on “Antichrist,” which required both emotional fearlessness and rigorous technique, along with a fair bit of nudity.
The trust factor on the set between the four key collaborators — von Trier, Gainsbourg, Dafoe and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle — was, in Dafoe’s estimation, “very high. And it needed to be. We gave what we got. We took a leap of faith with Lars, and he has a real talent for exploring taboo things that are there for all of us, but that most of us don’t access very well.”
At the Cannes Film Festival premiere in May, the press screening of “Antichrist” drew a memorable chorus of audible yelps and hostile cries, mixed with applause. The screening during the Chicago International Film Festival provoked a similar range of visceral and intellectual responses, from walkouts to rapture. The only thing Dafoe doesn’t like hearing, he said, is the charge that von Trier’s a misogynist.
The film, Dafoe believes, is simply too distinctive and strange to relate to garden-variety misogyny. Von Trier acknowledged that its content is largely “unreasonable.”
Dafoe, who worked with von Trier previously on “Manderlay,” prefers to call the results “very special.”
(“Antichrist” is also available via video-on-demand through IFC Films.)
