I am going to break from my holiday just to put on record that last night I saw one of the first true masterpieces of the century at the Cannes Film Festival.
Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist is both unwatchably horrible and utterly compelling. I shan’t reveal too much of the plot except to say that it explores the descent into Hadean co-dependence of a couple (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) after an unbearable trauma.
In search of emotional recovery, they head off to a forest, spectacularly misnamed as ‘Eden’. ‘Nature is Satan’s church,’ she tells her husband in one of many moments of witch-like incantation that scorn his professional, patriarchal ultra-rationalism as a psycho-therapist. And – take it from me – she isn’t kidding.
The film, rich in Catholic imagery, Dogme technique and grotesqueries not seen since the era of video nasties is a carnival of extremes: morality, mortality, Freudianism, faith, witchcraft, misogyny, parental failure – it is all in there.
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