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jbeall wrote:Associated Pess basically repeats the last ten posts.

Lars von Trier wrote:. . . I am the best film director in the world.

Lars von Trier wrote:[Antichrist is] a very dark dream about guilt and sex and stuff.

Jeff wrote:Mike D'Angelo (who outs himself as an LVT fanboy, for those who didn't already get the message) writes an open letter to Von Trier at the AV Club.

Jeff wrote:Mike D'Angelo (who outs himself as an LVT fanboy, for those who didn't already get the message) writes an open letter to Von Trier at the AV Club.

Mike D'Angelo wrote:

Spoiler

And if you think your depiction of man in nature resembles anything Tarkovsky ever did, you really need to take another look at his films, which tend not to feature hot naked actresses masturbating among the roots of trees.

May 19, 2009
Film
Lars von Trier Is Still Provocateur of Cannes
By MANOHLA DARGIS

CANNES, France — There’s no question that Lars von Trier knows how to get a rise out of the Cannes press — along with its rapt attention, its incredulous laughter and this year at least, its lusty jeers. The Danish middle-aged enfant terrible, who has been shaking up both the festival and world cinema for more than a decade with films like “Breaking the Waves” and “Dogville,” is clearly intent on holding on to his provocateur status, even if it means alienating (dividing, baffling) his audience further. This, in any event, seems one explanation for his latest, “Antichrist,” an alternately deadly serious and highly ironic exploration of psychosexual trauma, with Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as a couple grieving the death of their only child.

Spoiler

The first two images in “Antichrist” — a shot of the director’s name bluntly juxtaposed with a second shot of the movie’s title — seemed to tip his hand at once. Although the combination of “Lars von Trier/Antichrist” inspired some guffaws (how could it not?), the press audience at Cannes is not always given to easy laughter, particularly when gathered to witness the latest emission from an official auteur. The insistence on sobriety is partly a testament to the (welcome) reverence with which cinema is treated here, but it can also be deadening. Certainly temperance can be off the mark with Mr. von Trier, a master of mixing seemingly inappropriate tones who can be truly hilarious (“The Kingdom”) when he’s not being a sadist.

If the laughs are slow to boil in “Antichrist,” it’s largely because of the ugly opener, in which the couple’s toddler falls out an upper-story window to his death. That’s a tough way for any movie to begin, but it’s especially unpleasant because the death has no meaning in and of itself and certainly no emotional resonance. Rather, it’s a narrative device, as evident from how the death, shown in slow motion, is crosscut with images of the couple making passionate love. From the way Mr. von Trier trains his camera on Ms. Gainsbourg’s open mouth, gaping in a pantomime of ecstasy, it’s also all too obvious that mother love is a kind of abyss, one into which everyone — child and husband included — are destined to tumble.

And tumble they do, as death leads to bereavement leads to psycho high jinks in the couple’s secluded cabin in the woods. As acorns fall like hail, and the trees stir portentously, maternal love grows monstrous and more and more interchangeable with Mother Nature. At one point one of the characters ominously refers to nature as Satan’s playground or some such, which sounds like a line from Woody Allen by way of Ingmar Bergman. By the time the animatronic fox warns the understandably baffled-looking Mr. Dafoe that “chaos reigns,” it’s clear we’re not in Kansas anymore or even a serious movie. Chaos reigns, if not narrative sense, but I would be lying if I didn’t admit that this impossible movie kept me hooked from start to finish.

Ebert can't get it out of his head.

HarryLong wrote:And though Ebert doesn't mention it (& may not be aware of it) there is, I believe, a Gnostic Gospel that posits Satan as the creator.

PaganPoet wrote:Apparently, IFC has picked it up for distribution in the US.

Matt wrote:Well, there is the Demiurge, who is usually considered the "creator," but who is not the Supreme Being. To put it bluntly, it is God's building contractor who got everything wrong, possibly on purpose. The Cathars (to name one group) believed the Demiurge was Satan.

Von Trier agrees cuts to beat censors

COPENHAGEN (AFP) — Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier has agreed to a toned-down cut of his new film "Antichrist", which features graphic scenes of sexual mutilation, to satisfy foreign censors, his production company said Wednesday.

"We reached an agreement with Lars more than a year ago to make a 'Catholic' version of the movie, to cut some scenes and replace them with others," Peter Aalbaek Jensen, the head of the Zentropa production group, told AFP.

"Otherwise it would be impossible to sell (it) to prude markets like southern Europe, Asia and the United States, where you can't show a naked man from the front," he said.

The film's close-ups of sex and mutilation left audiences gasping, squirming and jeering when it was screened on Monday at the Cannes Film Festival.

Jensen said he "does not know yet which scenes will be censored" and will "talk to distributors in these countries to seek out their opinions on the subject."

The edited version will also enable Zentropa to sell it to television worldwide, he added.

Von Trier will begin work on the new version "after the Cannes festival," he said.

The uncut version of the film, which opens in Denmark on Wednesday, is one of 20 competing for the Palme d'Or at Cannes. It has been hailed by Danish critics, though viewers in Cannes on Monday gave it both cheers and boos.

It was written by von Trier as a form of therapy at the end of a long depression and inspired by his dreams and obsessions.

Willem Dafoe and France's Charlotte Gainsbourg deliver powerful performances in the movie as a couple who retreat to the woods to try to overcome grief at the death of their baby son.

Spoiler

It opens with a slow-motion close-up of sexual penetration, veers into a dramatic escalation of violence, and climaxes with an excruciating shot of Gainsbourg slicing off her clitoris with a pair of scissors.