Antichrist: Chaos reigns

CHRISTMAS SPECIAL

DIRECTED BY Lars von Trier, 2009

STARRING Charlotte Gainsbourg, Willem Dafoe

CERTIFICATION 18: Contains strong real sex, bloody violence and self-mutilation
RUN TIME 104 mins, Chelsea Films

COVER QUOTE 'Twisted, depraved and troubling… and also utterly brilliant' - Dave Edwards, The Mirror

WHY YOU SHOULD SEE IT Antichrist was largely ridiculed when it first screened at Cannes: jeers and laughter were followed by boos from the audience, amid isolated applause. Word quickly spread of the film's extremely violent sexual content, which reaches its peak with an extremely graphic image of female self-mutilation. Von Trier explained that he had been clinically depressed at the time of making the film and this was his way of working through those feelings. The Dogme-tic director called Antichrist, 'the most important film of my entire career'. NB It's entirely possible you may not want to read beyond this point, and I wouldn't blame you. Not one bit.

THE PLOT Prologue On a snowy night, in a beautiful, luminous black-and-white that's almost a parody of good taste, von Trier shows Gainsbourg and Dafoe having sex, to the accompaniment of a washing machine, while their baby son, Nic, falls from their apartment window to the snow-covered pavement below.

Chapter 1: Grief Charlotte Gainsbourg's character (I'm going to call them by the actors' first names, let's hope it doesn't get too confusing) collapses at Nic's funeral; the next time we see her is in hospital, one month later. Her husband, Willem (I know, but I'm going to plough on), a therapist, insists on overruling her doctor and takes Charlotte home for treatment. They work through a series of mental exercises together, which includes identifying her biggest fear. This, it seems, is centred on their country cabin, Eden; they travel there to confront her trauma. Willem sees a doe with an apparently dead fawn hanging from her hindquarters.

Chapter 2: Pain (Chaos reigns) Charlotte is suddenly overcome with terror and runs to the cabin, where Willem finds Polaroid pictures of her trip there in the summer with their son. Her antipathy towards Willem is heightened; she describes a scene from her earlier holiday when she could hear a baby crying even though Nic was fine. Willem this time comes across a bloody fox eating itself. It speaks the words: 'Chaos reigns.'

Chapter 3: Despair (Gynocide) Gynocide is the title of the thesis Charlotte was working on when she visited the cabin in the summer; climbing into the attic, Willem discovers her abandoned thesis, among many disturbing images of women being punished. In her notebook, Charlotte's writing deteriorates to an alarming scrawl. In a role-play game, Charlotte identifies with the arguments used against the women in her work.

Charlotte discovers Nic's autopsy report, which Willem has been hiding from her. In it, the coroner notes an earlier deformity of the bones in Nic's feet; in the Polaroids, Willem sees that Charlotte put Nic's shoes on the wrong feet. Charlotte attacks Willem, this time with a hatred and intensity not seen before, knocking him out and then attaching a metal weight to his leg. When Willem wakes he manages to crawl away and hide in a fox hole Charlotte has previously identified. She finds Willem's hiding place, drawn by the cries of a crow with which he is buried, and attacks him with a spade.

Chapter 4: The Three Beggars Charlotte rescues Willem from the foxhole and drags him back to the cabin. 'Do you want to kill me?' he asks. 'Not yet,' is the less-than-reassuring response. She is, she says, awaiting the arrival of the 'three beggars', at which time 'someone must die'. She remembers the opening scene of Nic's death; Charlotte saw him open the window and climb to his death. She cuts off her clitoris with a pair of scissors and then goes into the woods. Willem finds a wrench and manages to remove the weight from his leg; when Charlotte finds him she stabs him with scissors but Willem grabs her and strangles her. He burns her body in front of the cabin, an image filled with hundreds of bodies on the hillside.

Epilogue Willem leaves, watched by the three beggars: crow, deer and fox. Hundreds of faceless figures surround him.

THE FILM Antichrist was my Number One film for 2009. I saw it with a woman friend; you'll have gathered it's not a date movie. Its emotional effect is perhaps diminished with time but Antichrist does repay repeat viewings, and remains shocking.

Von Trier's film has a definite look, from the pristine black-and-white of the prologue through the seeped colours of the funeral scene. Willem Dafoe's early appearances are reminiscent of Tilda Swinton in Tony Gilroy's exemplary corporate drama Michael Clayton (2007) playing a very different role: the character Willem is accused of being aloof, and this is underlined by the blues and greys of his suits and settings. 'You've always been distant,' Charlotte says. 'Okay, can you give me some examples,' he replies. (I think this is supposed to be funny, and it is.)

Willem's arrogance is the initial root of the problem: a therapist, he ignores the dictum never to treat your own family and believes he is smarter than the younger doctor treating Charlotte. 'Trust others to be smarter than you,' she pleads, 'you're not a doctor.' But this is a dick thing, and his penis becomes a target when Charlotte seeks to punish him. When they get home and Willem can begin to work on her, she adds: 'I never interested you until now.' (It is very easy to imagine Charlotte Gainsbourg in the role of trophy wife.)

But there is something darker lurking under the surface, as von Trier shows us in the last shot in Charlotte's hospital room, when his camera zooms in on the murky, green water in a flower vase, rooting among the rotting stems. Antichrist moves into classic horror movie territory: the countryside, but here the enemy is not zombies, or malevolent yokels, but nature, notably women's nature. 'Nature is Satan's church,' according to Charlotte. And, later, 'Women do not control their own bodies, nature does.'

They set off to their woodland cabin, Eden, which is plagued by noisy acorns, which drop noisily on the roof, and ticks, which gorge themselves on Willem's exposed flesh. Willem is demonstrably unprepared for the countryside, equipped only with his smart overcoat and trendy bag as opposed to Charlotte's waterproof slicker and rucksack. 'You were the one who always wanted to go,' he chides, revealing a split in their relationship.

Last summer she went to the cabin with their son, Nic, but Willem did not join them. While there she worked on her aborted thesis, which perhaps provoked a previous breakdown, unnoticed by therapist Willem. An early breakthrough is thwarted when a fledgling chick falls out of tree (almost as in Breillat's Anatomy of Hell), is infested with ants, and then plucked up and eaten by a bird of prey. She attacks Willem for coming to her place: 'You shouldn't have come here, you're just so damn arrogant.'

The film's end credits list a series of researchers in a salutory range of specialisms: misogyny; mythology and evil; anxiety; horror films; music (the haunting theme used at the film's beginning and close is Lascia ch'io pianga, from Georg Friedrich Handel's opera Rinaldo); theology, and therapy (therapeutic consultants and teacher, rather, which is not quite the same thing). The denouement is an orgy of bloody sexuality, excruciating violence and animal cameos that unexpectedly fulfills Charlotte's prophecy: 'When three beggars arrive, someone must die.'

Dafoe the actor emerges in heroic mode - it's impossible not to think of his deserted figure in Platoon (1986), then set to Barber's Adagio for Strings. Framed against the hillside here, he has crafted a crutch from a branch and kneels to pick berries: the very outdoorsman, he has vanquished the wild west of womanhood.

KEY SCENES Chapter 1, 00:27 Charlotte and Willem are having sex in the shower; von Trier shows the snow outside, steam exiting through a vent, and a penis during intercourse. (Dafoe and Gainsbourg had body doubles: porn stars Mandy Starship and Horst Stramka.) All the while, the couple's baby, Nic, climbs out of his cot and pushes a chair underneath a window. Nic climbs up onto the sill; his look of wonder at the falling snow is reflected in Charlotte's absorption in the act of sex, and an air of completeness, satisfaction, at its end.

Chapter 8, 1:05:30 Following her breakdown, Charlotte seems to an aquire a frantic physical need for sex, this culminates in a scene in the cabin where she mounts Willem and tells him to hit her 'so it hurts'. He refuses and she runs out, naked, into the woods: beneath a tree, she masturbates furiously before Willem joins her and they have sex. The roots of the tree are filled with grasping hands - this image, or forms of it, was used on many posters for the film at the time of its cinema release.

Chapter 9, 1:11:57 Charlotte throws herself on top of Willem, then staves in his crotch with a substantial log. When she notices his erection, even though he has passed out, she jerks him off until he ejaculates blood. This is when she goes for a toolbox and, using a hand drill, attaches a round weight through his leg.

Chapter 10, 1:27:20 Charlotte kisses Willem, undresses and lies next to him, pulling his hand between her legs. Following a flashback to the night of Nic's death, the moment when she cuts off her clitoris is shown in detail.

FURTHER VIEWING Where to begin with von Trier? There's Dancer in the Dark (2000), which seemed to drive pop star Björk almost to breakdown (von Trier claimed she tried to eat her dress on set); The Idiots (1998), probably the single film that allowed him to put such strong images as those in Antichrist on the screen; or incredibly spooky TV series The Kingdom (1994), set in a hospital peopled with a gallery of eccentric and unforgettable characters. Then there's Beneath the Waves (1996), which features an incredible central performance from Emily Watson, and is one of the most shockingly blasphemous pieces of cinema you'll ever see. Wonderful.

KEY QUOTE 'Never screw your therapist' - Willem Dafoe's character

Merry Christmas and have a very happy 2011!

The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Czech mates

DIRECTED BY Philip Kaufman, 1988

STARRING Daniel Day-Lewis (Tomas), Juliette Binoche (Tereza), Lena Olin (Sabina)

CERTIFICATION 18: Contains strong sex

RUN TIME 165 mins, Warner Bros

COVER QUOTE 'The most erotic serious film since Last Tango in Paris' - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times

WHY YOU SHOULD SEE IT With Christmas drawing close I thought I'd indulge myself with a couple of not exactly festive films, but snowy ones (see also next week). This adaptation from the book by Milan Kundera is not explicit, but it is sexy. The sex scenes now seem coy, when the same wording is used by the BBFC for such a film as Ang Lee's Lust, Caution (2007), which was rumoured on release to feature unsimulated intercourse.

THE PLOT Prague, 1968: Tomas, a young doctor, flirts with a nurse, telling her to take off her clothes; he visits Sabina - who is described as 'the woman who understood him best', and who complains he never stays till morning, nor does he ever allow a woman to spend the night at his ('Are you afraid of women, doctor?'). Tomas travels to a spa where he meets and flirts with the apparently innocent Tereza. She comes to visit him in Prague, unannounced, and ends up staying.

Tomas introduces the two main women in his life in the hope Sabina can help Tereza, who is starting out as a photographer. Tereza and Tomas marry, with Tomas' farmer patient Pavel and his pet pig Mephisto as witnesses, but Tomas continues to have affairs - on the night Tereza confronts him, the Russians invade: she runs out to take photographs, which she hands over to Dutch journalists. Sabina flees to Geneva, where she begins an affair with a married university professor, Frans. When Tomas and Teresa also go to Switzerland, the latter struggles to find work and returns, unannounced, to Czechoslovakia. Tomas follows.

Hounded from his work as a surgeon because of anti-Communist article he wrote before the invasion, Tomas becomes a window cleaner, with the particular perks that affords a man of his nature. Tereza decides to embark on an affair with a customer in the bar where she works (played by Stellan Skarsgard, Mamma Mia!) but it appears this may have been a trap. Sick of the suspicion lurking in Prague, Tereza insists they move again; they join Pavel on his farm.

The scene shifts to the United States, where Sabina has set up as an artist. She receives a letter saying Tomas and Tereza have died in a car accident. After a night out dancing, Tomas and Tereza drive back to the farm; he says, perhaps for the first time, that he is happy.

THE FILM When I was at university, Milan Kundera's book of The Unbearable Lightness of Being was pretty much prescribed reading for every poseur on campus. I loved it. Kundera has fallen out of fashion, as has this form of tasteful, epic cinema, to which director Kaufman added a healthy smattering of sex. It's a strange film as it seems to be linked by its almost non-stop score, from the opening spa scenes, through the comic themes of Tomas' seductions, the darkness of the Soviet invasion to bucolic countryside themes at the close.

Much of the sex in the film The Unbearable Lightness of Being is played for comedy: Tomas orders a nurse to strip for him in his hopital, with fellow surgeons and a patient looking on from an adjoining room; Tereza leaps onto Tomas after a spurious check up ('Don't worry, I'm a doctor'); on another occasion, the camera pans to their dog, Karenin, looking mournful. The only time the sexual anticipation is serious is when Tereza takes nude pictures of Sabina: Tereza's eyes fill with tears at the exposure of her husband's lover before Sabina continues the seduction. The looks on Tereza's face as Sabina begins her friend's exposure preempts Maggie Gyllenhaal's similar predicament in Secretary.

Kaufman (writer/director of The Right Stuff and writer on the Indiana Jones movies) makes the most of his two women stars: Olin shows off her legs from the start, stretching her acting muscles when she moves to Geneva. Binoche rises above her silly accent to produce a startling performance: I've never warmed to her onscreen, nor is she conventionally sexy, but her defenceless portrayal rises above the innocent gamine Tereza could easily be.

The director, however, is better on the historic than the personal: his film was fêted on its release for the method (much like Woody Allen's Zelig) he inserted his characters into contemporary, often black-and-white, footage of the Prague invasion, even to the appropriation of famous images. Those scenes have lost nothing of their power more than 20 years on from the film, and 40 after the events which inspired them. The scenes of the couple's flight are particularly poignant, reenacted as they were following the fall of the Iron Curtain.

KEY SCENES Disc One, Chapter 5, 17:27 In the iconic image that is used on the DVD cover, Sabina poses in bowler hat and underwear over a mirror that has been placed on the floor by Tomas. In the following scene, Tereza visits Tomas at his flat for the first time. She sneezes and he pretends to give her a physical examination before she jumps him.

Chapter 8, 27:03 Sabina and Tomas are having sex, with her on top, when she spots him checking his watch in the mirror. She hides one of his socks in revenge.

Chapter 13, 50:47 Tereza is swimming in the public baths when she has a hallucination: the group of women exercising in front of her are suddenly naked. Among them she spots Tomas, who seems to be offering her own nude figure up. That night she tells Tomas she wants to see the women with whom he has affairs: 'Take me to them, I'll undress them for you.'

Chapter 22, 1:24:44 Tereza asks Sabina to model nude for her; they drink and Tereza takes pictures, before Sabina turns the tables on Tereza. Their assignation is interrupted by the arrival of Franz, who declares he has left his wife. Sabina asks him to come back the next day; when he returns, her studio is completely bare.

Disc Two, Chapter 31, 16:14 On his window cleaning rounds, Tomas is seduced by the wife of a high-ranking party member. At home that night, Tereza smells the woman's sex in Tomas' hair. Tereza cannot understand how he can make love to women without being in love. 'I wish I could be like you,' she says. 'Insensitive.'

Chapter 33, 22:27 Tereza decides to visit an engineer she meets in the bar where she works but she believes she is being spied upon and is initially unresponsive: she allows herself to be undressed and forces herself to go through with it.

FURTHER VIEWING Kaufman's film is steeped in the history of Czech cinema, feeling particularly close to Milos Forman's bawdy The Firemen's Ball (1967). (In the 1970s and '80s, of course, Forman was working in Hollywood on such movies as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Amadeus.) There's another Czech director whose work I'd like to highlight here, however, partly because he's made a few films based on the work of another great Czech writer, Bohumil Hrabal, including, most recently, I Served the King of England (2006).

Jirí Menzel's masterwork is probably Larks on a String (1969), but it's to another Hrabal adaptation I turn here: Closely Observed Trains (1966). Set in a rural railway station it manages to combine a young man's crisis over the loss of his virginity, resistance efforts to delay the Nazi invasion and the station manager's predilection for stamping the naked bottoms of young women with his official seal. Unforgettable.

KEY QUOTE 'Take off your clothes' - Tomas, repeatedly