TIRED  TRIER

Lars Von Trier is not a cineaste. He does art exhibitions on projection.

For someone who was signed under the redundant manifestation of Dogme95, – an amnesiac and obnoxious bunch rehashing the monolithic principles of the Nouvelle Vague in declaration of a new world of cinema, pursuing ‘honest filmmaking’ – film after film, Trier has been excelling at making films that achieve packing a lifeless art exhibition into 2 dimensional projection.

From his miraculous Breaking the Waves on, Trier’s work has increasingly been inorganic, tungsten bathed worlds of documentary mimicking artificiality with handheld camera that is now a formulaic substitute to be able to write in the cinematographic language, having nothing to say. Although, Trier has things to say, they are smothered by his tasteless methods of realisation.

From his props to how he tackles his subject matter, in the case of Anti-Christ it is vaguely ‘the nature of good and evil and the good and evil of nature’ the film belongs to the most ignoble and autistic of all industries; the art world not to the cinema. Because, ‘Art is artefact, Cinema is life.’ 9.

Thrown in a world of expedient unreality, the Anti-Christ is bookended by the gorgeous Lascia ch’io pianga from the Handel opera Rinaldo which in its all magnitude and detachment from the images on the screen represents the forlorn reality in this film. The most significant part of the film, slow-motion prologue set against Handel may as well be a car commercial. The contorting kinetic beauty of this scene solely depends on the uninterrupted  music and therefore is a cope-out.

Charlotte Gainsbourg (Serge, Ma Beau Serge) and William Defoe fuck in their body doubles throughout the film and when not fucking dabble to play a mourning couple who loses their baby.  In their weary performances, acting is sealed in a restrained dramatic space, quite literally, since the film is largely set on a claustrophobic forest turned studio set, stinks of artificiality and the same gallery/hospital feel that disinfects any spot of zeal. That said, experiencing the film was intriguing, nevertheless, on the strength of my own contemplative scanning, the thoughts that it mainly triggered on the ebb and flow of its shortcomings.

Antichrist is an art film from 2009 by a celebrated artistic trier, but not a cineaste who would be practically a poet of sound and image like Carl Dryer, Carné, Bresson, Godard, Bergman, Bunuel, Tarkovsky, the latter to whom Anti-Christ was dedicated to.

Is it a Scandinavian trait, overthinking in minimalism? If Ikea was a hallucinating filmmaker, the result would be Anti-Christ.

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