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!

Intermission: Leap Year

Director Michael Rowe was inspired to write Leap Year, which is out this Friday, by a story he was told 'about a conservative woman who'd accepted a sadomasochistic relationship in order to keep her lover from leaving.' Laura (Monica Del Carmen) is a freelance business journalist: her day is made up of ringing editors for work ('30 tips to take advantage of the economic crisis'), carrying the can when things go wrong, eating, cleaning (the fridge), reading (Erich Fromm), wanking. She's also alone: a ring on her hand and picture by her bedside may hint at a man in her life but she pretends to family and one-night stands she has a full time seeing friends, going out and eating well, when she's mooching around in her pyjamas scoffing something from a tin.

Set in Mexico, Leap Year portrays a very different life to that of Y tu mamá también's spoiled brats, rather Laura could be a grown-up daughter of the indigenous couple at the centre of Battle in Heaven. Australian Rowe has lived in Mexico for 16 years and says he has an outsider's perspective on Mexican society, though the Spanish-language film is very much an inside job: other than views from the window, his camera never leaves Laura's flat. This is Rear Window without the repressed sexuality; Laura masturbates watching the next-door couple performing mundane tasks.

Laura misses their intimacy, which she finds in Arturo, a man who takes sly interest in her while dealing out beatings. Their sex progresses in the manner of the couple in Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses, through throttling and pissing to knives. Initially submissive, Laura strips ready for sex every time Arturo appears, like Cécilia in L'ennui. Throughout the film Laura crosses off the days of her February calendar; she takes control of the relationship towards the end of this leap-year month - it could be called 29 Days Later.

In the Realm of the Senses: Empire state

ALSO KNOWN AS Ai no korîda, L'empire des sens

DIRECTED BY Nagisa Oshima, 1976

STARRING Eiko Matsuda (Sada Abe), Tatsuya Fuji (Kichizo Ishida)

CERTIFICATION 18

RUN TIME 98 mins approx, Nouveaux Pictures

LANGUAGE Japanese

COVER QUOTE 'The expression of total passion' - The Times

WHY YOU SHOULD SEE IT Four years after hardcore Deep Throat, and two years after the soft-focus Emmanuelle, director Oshima distilled the desperation of sex for this exceptionally explicit arthouse movie. This version is available uncut though, crucially, one scene involving a very young child has been panned and scanned.

As the closing narration explains, Oshima based his film on a true story of a murderous affair which took place in Tokyo in 1936 and saw Sada Abe being treated as something of a folk hero in Japan. The insular complicity portrayed between the two protagonists means the film is not wholeheartedly moving but it is an extraordinary vision of sexual obsession.

THE PLOT Former prostitute Sada works in an inn, where she and another maid spy on the owner, Kichizo Ishida, and his wife having sex. When Sada is maligned as a whore she breaks into a furious row, which has to be broken up by Kichi. Kichi makes a pass at Sada when she is working and the two begin an affair, first in the inn and then visiting neighbouring hostels. At one, the couple stage a wedding celebration.

The couple become notorious with the staff at places where they stay for remaining confined in their rooms, barely eating but drinking and fucking all the time. Sada arouses Kichi's jealousy when she goes to visit a client while Sada herself becomes increasingly possessive of Kichi, threatening to cut off his penis if he ever has sex with his wife again.

The affair becomes more intense as the couple introduce strangulation into their intercourse. Sada strangles Kichi, apparently with his previous understanding, and then cuts off his penis. According to the closing vioceover, she wandered the streets of Tokyo gripping his dismembered member for four days before she was arrested.

THE FILM When Kichi first meets Sada she is wielding a knife. He lewdly implies she should be holding his penis instead and, for much of the rest of the movie, she is grasping one, the other, or both. Famously, a knife is finally applied to his penis, fatally.

In the Realm of the Senses opens with a scene of a homeless drunk being abused by some children. When Sada goes to his aid, he recognises her, claiming he used to visit her as a client. He begs one last encounter, offering to pay, and, momentarily, she takes his penis before being called away. There's an immediate sense of the power sex has over her and, perhaps, her own sexual power, which may have reduced this man to the gutter.

Sada is aware of her own attraction to sex and it is important for her, early in her affair with Kichi, to distinguish it from madness. 'I'm not sick,' she says; she's visited a doctor, showing the level of her concern: she's not a nymphomaniac, or any other tawdry diagnosis that might be applied, but 'hypersensitive'.

There is, also, an early indication of her propensity for violence: when she sees Kichi being shaved by his wife, Sada imagines taking the blade and attacking the woman. The scene which has been optically altered shows her tugging a small boy's penis, an image that would likely be deemed indecent under the Protection of Children Act.

Kichi is initially portrayed as a dissolute, if charming, drunk, prone to giggles and singing. He is fascinated by Sada's youth ('I'm no longer so young - how I envy you') and, as her madness grows, increasingly falls under her spell. He is the first to take her by the throat but the roles change as he says he can't bear to see her suffer. He allows her to throttle him with growing force for the pleasure it gives her (it is unclear if he is afforded any thrill beyond her enjoyment). Alongside some outdoor shots, these later scenes are some of the most beautiful in the movie as they achieve an almost mesmeric quality as she rides him in the throes of her orgasm.

Much of the film concentrates on his penis: it is shown erect, Sada fellates him or, at other times, holds a knife to it. When he wakes one morning, he finds her playing with it. 'Did you hold it all night,' Kichi asks. 'Of course.' 'It's as if he was yours,' he says later. 'He is.' Sada even has him piss inside her though, at another time, Kichi muses this is the only time his penis can rest. When they go home, she leads him by his penis and, of course, it becomes the focus of her threats: 'If I cut him off will you die?' 'Probably.' 'Then I don't want to.'

They do venture out, if only to go home or earn some money, and the outside world is an unwelcome visitor on their frolics. Maids criticise the state of their room - smell is especially important to Sada, while both partners enjoy the feel of each other's skin - encourage them to eat or, at least, to have less sex. They seem particularly shocked by Sada's continual willingness to suck Kichi's cock. At one point Kichi is warned, 'She'll end up killing you.'

By then, they are so wrapped up in their perpetual orgy, this prophecy is accepted as inevitable. Sada seems to achieve one incredible, final, orgasm at his death; in blood, she writes on her lover's body: 'The two of us, forever.'

KEY SCENES Chapter 2, 14:05 Kichi has Sada mount him at his home while she plays a musical instrument to cover for his wife. After sex she sucks his penis while he smokes a cigarette.

Chapter 3, 26:06 Sada and Kichi have sex in front of a group of women musicians. One of the women is deflowered by the others using a dildo carved in the shape of a bird before they all join in.

Chapter 4, 40:36 Kichi rapes the elderly madam of the inn where he and Sada are staying while Sada goes to visit a client, a school principal, to earn some money. She urges the ageing teacher to hit her, first across the face, then pinch her and pull her hair.

Chapter 5, 49:26 Sada 'lays' an egg that Kichi has inserted in her vagina, a surrealist image worthy of Georges Bataille. In his Story of the Eye (1928), protagonist Simone indulges in just such behaviour.

Chapter 7, 1:10:30 Sada urges Kichi to have sex with a 68-year-old woman, who pisses herself at the act's conclusion.

Chapter 8, 1:17:54 Kichi allows Sada to tie a belt around his neck which she tightens as they have sex.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT In the Realm of the Senses was critically acclaimed when it arrived at the 1976 London Film Festival, where it won the critics' prize. To avoid cuts, the film was shown in cinema clubs and was only first submitted to the BBFC in 1989.

The film was passed uncut for cinemas in 1991 - optical tinkering for that one scene notwithstanding - largely due to the wealth of critical opinion that had built up behind it. This would support a defence of artistic merit if any prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act was sought. (A friend who saw it at the time only said it confirmed her antipathy towards eggs.) Video/DVD release was officially achieved in 2000. (Virgin had released an uncertificated version in 1982 but it was withdrawn in 1984 when the Video Recordings Act became law; it demands BBFC approval for any release.)

Oshima went on to make such films as Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (1983), starring musicians David Bowie and Ryuichi Sakamoto alongside director Takeshi Kitano, and Empire of Passion (1978), another eroticised telling of a true murder tale, from 1895, about a peasant woman and her younger lover, who conspire to kill the woman's husband. Afterwards they are pursued by his spirit and overcome with guilt.

KEY QUOTE 'Instead of a knife you should be holding something else' - Kichi

BONUS CURIO (1) To avoid prosecution in Japan while shooting, the film was listed as a French production and undeveloped footage shipped to France for processing and editing.

(2) When Oshima struggled to find anyone to play Sada Abe because of the controversial nature of the material his actress wife, Akiko Koyama, offered to take the role.

Irreversible: Back to hell

DIRECTED BY Gaspar Noé, 2002
STARRING Monica Bellucci (Alex), Vincent Cassell (Marcus), Albert Dupontel (Pierre)
CERTIFICATION 18: Contains very strong violence, sexual violence, sex and language
RUN TIME 97 mins approx, Tartan
LANGUAGE French

COVER QUOTE 'One of the most important films in the last 20 years of movie history' - Dazed & Confused

WHY YOU SHOULD WATCH IT It's told in reverse. It stars Monica Bellucci. She gets anally raped. Oh.

THE PLOT Irreversible begins with its end credits, rolling down the screen before they skew to the side.

1. Blue lights flash on the outside wall of a building and the camera flies into a room where Philippe Nahon, the butcher from Noé's Seul contre tous (1998), is sitting naked on a bed. He's regaling another man with his crime: 'I slept with my daughter. She was so cute.'

2. They're distracted by sirens arriving at the club downstairs which, we're told, is called the Rectum. A man, Marcus, is wheeled out on a stretcher, his shoulder strapped up. Another man, Pierre, comes out with the police; he's told he'll likely get 10 years in jail for what he did.

3. Marcus and Pierre enter 'felching fuck club' the Rectum looking for a man called Tenia, a type of tapeworm. Various acts are being performed in the club, including blow jobs, beatings, anal sex and fisting, which the two men are asked to participate in. Marcus finds someone who may be Tenia and attacks him with a bottle; Tenia throws Marcus to the ground and breaks his arm. Pierre grabs a fire extinguisher and beats Tenia's head to pulp.

4. Marcus is driving a taxi to the area where the Rectum is supposed to be; when Pierre tries to leave in the cab, Marcus smashes the car's windows. Pierre is screaming insults at Marcus, saying he must think of Alex in hospital.

5. Marcus throws a cab driver out of his taxi.

6. Pierre and Marcus are interrogating prostitutes in the company of two hoods; Marcus attacks a transsexual prostitute who admits he saw what happened: the man they want is called Tenia, and can be found in the Rectum.

7. Pierre is in a daze in the back of a police van, being interrogated. In the street he and Marcus are accosted by two local gangsters who say they will help them get revenge.

8. Coming out of an apartment block, Pierre and Marcus see a woman, Alex, being lifted into an ambulance on a stretcher. Her face is a bloody mess.

9. Alex exits the apartment block and tries to hail a taxi; she's advised to use the underpass to cross the road. It's here she is raped in a drawn-out scene, described below.

10. Marcus is making fun of Pierre at the party; with two women they go into a bathroom, where Marcus takes some coke and kisses the women. Alex is with a pregnant woman friend, telling her it's a special day. Marcus is obviously off his face and Alex tells him she wants to leave.

11. It becomes clear Pierre is Alex's ex; on the way to the party, on the Metro with Alex and Marcus, Pierre tries to get the couple to describe their sex life.

12. Alex and Marcus are shown in bed; Alex tells Marcus she dreamt of a red tunnel split in two. She tells Marcus her period is late but he says he would be pleased if she was pregnant. They play around together (Marcus puts Etienne Daho's cover of Edith Piaf's Mon manège à moi on the stereo) and Marcus tells Alex he wants to fuck her arse. He goes to buy a bottle before the party, she takes a shower and then a pregnancy test. Her reaction implies it is positive.

13. The final scene shows her lying in the gardens outside the flat, where children are playing in a sprinkler's spray.

THE FILM Despite a grudging admiration for Seul contre tous, I avoided Irreversible when it first came out in the cinema. I succumbed to review a special DVD edition for Little White Lies magazine but continue to be perplexed by the popularity of this movie: why would you want it in your home?

Irreversible answers a simple question: how do you end a rape drama on a happy note? Tell it backwards. Noé is a virtuoso technician and Irreversible shows off his talents to their full, though the film is not exactly backwards, rather its scenes are shown in reverse order. How seriously, though, do you take a film involving a search for a character named after a tapeworm in a place called the Rectum?

The film's politics are defiantly unreconstructed: 'Blood calls for vengeance,' two gangsters say. 'This is a man's business.' Sam Peckinpah examines a man's quest for revenge when the character's wife is raped in Straw Dogs (1971); Noé's associates Despentes and Trinh Thi posit an equally bloody female response in Baise-Moi.

Here, it is Pierre who boils over and smashes Tenia's head to pieces. Pierre has tried to hold Marcus back: Marcus goads Pierre over his apparently asexual life since Alex left him - is he gay? Homophobia is rife throughout the film; when we do see gay men, in the Rectum, they are extreme caricatures (none tries to stop Pierre killing Tenia, there is even some applause).

To Pierre, Marcus is an animal; this, it turns out, is why Alex is drawn to the latter. Pierre could be a typically neurotic, if uncharacteristically explicit, Woody Allen character; he tells a self-deprecating story how the one time Alex cried out during sex she had banged her head on some furniture. When Pierre quizzes the couple on their sex life, Alex says Pierre was too considerate with her, an altruist, she wants a man who takes his pleasure with her (as, Noé could be saying, the rapist does).

Tenia, Alex's rapist, is encountered with a transsexual; during his assault Tenia makes clear that he wouldn't normally fuck a woman. He berates Alex for being rich - she has dressed up for the party - and punishes her for being beautiful. (We have no idea what she or Marcus does, though Pierre is mocked for being a philosophy teacher, whether literally or not is unclear.)

If the film's moral is stated at the end - ie the beginning - it perhaps lies in Nahon's butcher's philosophy: 'Gotta fight, gotta live. Go on fighting, go on living.' At the beginning - the end - Noé underlines the possibility of Alex's pregnancy by twice showing a poster for 2001: A Space Odyssey featuring a floating foetus. The film closes with a scene of picture-perfect tranquility. It is said Noé used a 27 hertz tone in the film's soundtrack to induce nausea in viewers (the score is by Daft Punk's Thomas Bangalter). At the end, you may well feel sick.

KEY SCENE Chapter 10, 42:54 Alex walks down the underpass and sees a couple fighting. The man beats the woman and, when Alex passes, he grabs her. He pulls a knife on her and forces her to the ground. He holds her mouth shut and anally rapes her while all the time spouting threats and obscenities. (In case we don't get the point, Noé added a CGI penis to the assailant in post-production.) The scene lasts some time; when he finishes Alex tries to crawl away but he begins to kick her head. He then grabs her, punches her many times and pummels her face into the ground.

FURTHER VIEWING Noé's new film, Enter the Void, opens this Friday, 24 September, and includes a sex scene from inside the vagina, reminiscent of Nic Roeg's dire Puffball (2007). Noé is said to be working on an 'erotic love' movie next.

THE QUOTE 'Time destroys everything' - End caption

BONUS CURIO Noé collects posters for Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is presumably where the image used near the end of Irreversible comes from.

A Hole in My Heart: Blessed be the pornographers

DIRECTED BY Lucas Moodysson, 2004

STARRING Björn Almroth (Erik), Sanna Bråding (Tess), Thorsten Flinck (Rickard), Goran Marjanovic (Geko)

CERTIFICATION 18: Contains strong sex, sex references and surgical images

RUN TIME 93 mins approx, Metrodome

LANGUAGE Swedish

COVER QUOTE 'Moodysson's most radical and daring film to date' - The Guardian

WHY YOU SHOULD WATCH IT Swedish director Moodysson delves into the world of homemade porn.

THE PLOT Teen Erik lives at home with his father, Rickard, who's making a porn film in the living room, with friend Geko and wannabe star Tess. Erik is a loner who stays in his room listening to industrial music on his headphones and keeps pet earthworms; the others encourage Tess to have sex with him, but slowly the two form a tentative friendship. The porn shoot becomes increasingly extreme as the three protagonists spend time in each other's company and drink more; after filming one particularly violent scene, Tess runs away. When she returns she brings some food with her; the dinner that follows descends into pandemonium, an atmosphere that's little helped when Geko later lets slip a secret from Rickard's childhood.

THE FILM From the despair Moodysson plumbs in Lilya 4-Ever (2002), you may be surprised to hear that the director offers some hope in A Hole in My Heart, especially as it features many graphic and disturbing scenes. The assault begins immediately with loud bursts of static noise and clips of organs, objects being inserted into various orifices and other close-ups (eyes and skin, often). It's a confusing montage whose contents gradually reveal themselves throughout the movie but, if you're going to stick with A Hole, you can't say you haven't been warned.

Broadly, Moodysson draws parallels here between the need for attention of amateur porn stars and Big Brother contestants; these are wounded people trying to live up to a sexualised image of the world they've bought into. Characters talk to camera and step into a wardrobe, as if to enter the famous BB diary room. Tess has been turned down for the TV show but is happy to do anything to appear in a porn film; she boasts of having had an operation to have her labia reduced, and many of the surgical clips show just that procedure. This was some time before the furore over Lars von Trier's Antichrist.

Latterly it becomes clear that some of the images we've seen, of plastic figures being pushed into a vagina or anus, feature a latex sex toy and not a real person. Action Man- and Barbie doll-type figures are used to illustrate some of the scenes, including sex between Tess, Rickard and Geko, though the real thing is shown as well. Tess is seen frantically trying to make herself come too, alone on the bathroom floor.

From the experimental, industrial music that son Erik listens to on his headphones, the soundtrack often jarringly switches to upbeat pop, as if the porn shoot were an MTV-style reality soap. (A noose hangs in the middle of Erik's room and on the window is a paper cross.) At one point the characters start playing football in the flat, an ironic take on the happy family scene at the end of Moodysson's Together (2000).

In an attempt to bond with his son, Rickard sets up a shooting target in the flat using a centrefold of a naked woman, her head replaced by the bull's eye; Rickard and Geko fire air rifles at the model's breasts and vagina until there is nothing left but black gaps. Dressed in a mask and motorcycle helmet the two men confront Tess for a scene in their porn film, until she escapes from the flat, taking her belongings with her.

Erik says that his earthworms will transform into butterflies; when Geko falls asleep in the scene of double penetration, he dreams of UFOs and corn circles. When Tess runs away, she collapses in a supermarket car park. Real-life is not enough for her: 'Everyone's so boring out there,' she complains, 'people are so ugly.' (Earlier on, she has read out a list of different types of cosmetic surgery to camera; idiosyncratically, there's also a discussion of the repercussions of education policy later.)

Famously, Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove was supposed to have a ended with a custard pie fight in the war room between the various heads of states; A Hole in My Heart climaxes with a particularly graphic food fight which, along with the revelation that Rickard suffered abuse as a child from his father, Erik's grandfather, provides catharsis. The characters break out of the confines of the flat and, for pretty much the first time, we see the sky. Tess and Erik play a morbid game where they try and fit themselves into laundrette drying machines, this time more like something from Jackass. There is finally laughter, though for many viewers it may come too late.

KEY SCENES Chapter 4, 23:01 Geko, Rickard and Tess take part in a threesome on Rickard's fold-out bed. The action is foregrounded by a demonstration using children's action figures. During the scene, bluntly titled 'DP' on the DVD, Geko dreams that he's fallen alseep; when he wakes up he discovers he was asleep, much to Tess's amusement and Rickard's anger.
Chapter 7, 41:04 Tess makes herself up and dresses for the filming of another scene; when the men come out their faces are masked and they're wielding a baseball bat. At first verbal threats are made and then the scene becomes increasingly dark; when Tess is physically threatened she gets up and leaves.
Chapter 10, 1:04:56 Food is sprayed around the flat and over the three characters involved in filming the porn film; snacks, and even washing up liquid, are stuffed and poured into Tess's mouth. Geko pees into a wine glass he says he will make her drink; he is then sick into her mouth.

FURTHER VIEWING Moodysson's earlier work is surprisingly heartwarming and may come as welcome relief following A Hole in My Heart and its extremely bleak predecessor, Lilya 4-Ever. Fucking Amal (released here as Show Me Love, 1998) is the story of a gay girl trying to get by at school; it's unromantic, but uplifting nonetheless, boasting tremendous central performances from Alexandra Dahlstrom and Rebecka Liljeberg. It's easy to remember Together for the climactic, snowy football kickabout which bonds the film's cast of disillusioned hippies, split families and wounded children.

After A Hole in My Heart, Moodysson continued his move from art-house cinema into film-making that is more appropriate for the art gallery with Container (2007). A woman and a fat man fool about onscreen in black and white. Don't bother.

KEY QUOTE 'You don't like women, that's the thing' - Erik

BONUS CURIO Moodysson claimed in an interview with the Guardian that a Swedish couple was caught having sex in a cinema in during a screening of A Hole in My Heart, which seems unlikely. He sounds heartened by the prospect.

Baise-Moi: Grrls with guns

DIRECTED BY Virginie Despentes, Coralie Trinh Thi, 2000
STARRING Karen Lancaume as Karen Bach (Nadine), Raffaëla Anderson (Manu)
CERTIFICATION 18: Frequent/very strong language, sex/nudity and violence. Some hard drugs use
RUN TIME 73 mins approx, Universal
LANGUAGE French

COVER QUOTE 'The most extreme thriller you'll ever see legally' - Uncut

WHY YOU SHOULD WATCH IT A censor's worst nightmare: sex and violence. Based on a 1994 novel by Virginie Despentes, who worked as a prostitute after she was raped aged 17; co-director Coralie Trinh Thi was a porn actress, as were the film's two stars.

THE PLOT Manu and a friend are picked up by three men and raped in a warehouse; later she fights with her brother and shoots him dead. Nadine, a prostitute, falls out with her flatmate and apparently kills her; Nadine goes to join her fixer friend Vincent but sees him shot and killed. Manu and Nadine run into each other by chance and agree to drive to Paris together; Manu forces Nadine at gunpoint to take them to the coast.

In the morning they agree to join forces and embark on an unpremeditated killing spree. Their targets include: a woman at a cash till who they mug; a man (who they kick to death) who picks them up but refuses to have sex without a condom; two policemen, and the entire clientele of a 'fuck club'. They stay in hotels and pull random men for sex while a major hunt is underway for them. At a roadside café, Manu is killed; Nadine rescues her body and sets fire to it. The next morning Nadine intends to kill herself but is caught by the police.

THE FILM The theft by a boiler repairman (that's not a euphemism) of a few of my DVDs more than a year ago was the partial inspiration for this blog. I immediately spotted that one of the films he had taken was Julio Medem's excellent Sex and Lucía, but it was only recently that I realised another of the DVDs he lifted was Baise-Moi, and this became the catalyst for me to finally get writing.

There's a lot in Baise-Moi to get worked up about: the rape, the mindless violence, the close-up shots of genitalia... But it's not as offensive as Gaspar Noé's Irreversible, say, and in its madcap, freewheeling way, is almost likeable. Widely portrayed as Thelma and Louise with guns - and full-on sex, and drink, and drugs, and no morality, and little sense of its own structure - it's hard to be truly offended by this film. That's not to say you won't be shocked.

Baise-Moi isn't the first time hardcore actors have been cast in a 'mainstream' (in the sense that dsitributors hoped it would be shown in general city-centre or, at least, art-house, cinemas) film: Catherine Breillat cast Rocco Siffredi in Romance (1999), for instance, and has used him since; Steven Soderbergh had Sasha Grey as the lead in his strangely asexual 2009 movie, The Girlfriend Experience. But here, the main artistic core of the movie seems to have been taken over by practioners from the porn industry: Trinh Thi, Lancaume, Anderson... What seemed to inflame matters further was that they were all women. These girls were doing it for themselves.

One neat little gag (the only one) comes when Nadine recognises Manu from porn films. Manu assumes that Nadine must have been forced to watch them with a boyfriend but, as we're shown early in the film, Nadine is happy to enjoy them on her own. (The glimpse we see implies that she watches violent porn.)

When Nadine visits a client, the film playing in his room, which she's more interested in than his promise to make her come, is Gaspar Noé's Seul Contre Tous (1998). Noé is thanked at the end of the film and his filmic philosophy serves as some sort of inspiration for Baise-Moi: his is an almost nihilist cinema of style over substance, despair over hope, degradation over ambition and shock over awe. One clip Despentes and Trinh Thi show from Seul Contre Tous exemplifies the level all three directors, including Noé, are working at: his butcher hero slicing a sausage.

At one moment in Baise-Moi, Manu kills a man who crudely tries to pick her up in the street but the violence is not simply meted out to men who cross the line. Women are dispatched with even less care as there is no reason to kill them; 'Where are the lines?' complains Manu, mourning the James Bond aspect of murder we've all become inured to in big-screen action movies. 'People are dying, the dialogue has to be up to it.'

In one scene Nadine poses like Luc Besson's Nikita with the latest addition to her artillery, CD Walkman incongruously hooked in her pants. (Nor do the men always get what's coming to them: a man who they've brought back for a foursome with his friend is simply told to leave their room, and does so. Another man, though, who tries to chat Nadine up with a gun to his head, may think he's worked his charm but is in for a surprise.)

Baise-Moi is not a very good film (Anderson tries too hard, though Lancaume is a strong, natural presence) but, you'll have gathered, I have a soft spot for it. When it was attacked as pornography, its directors and stars defended it by saying it was not meant to turn viewers on, a naturally reductive argument that's often used with deeply sexual material.

While the two leads of 9 Songs are actors and were hired for that reason, there's an emotional honesty there that lifts it above pornography; Baise-Moi is adrenalised caper, which its creators likened to comics, so the inclusion of graphic sex is questionable, if defensible. Whether any of its scenes work on the level of arousal, is up to you.

KEY SCENES Chapter 6, 33:50 Nadine and Manu decide to get wasted and pull two men in a bar. They go up to their room for sex; the women watch each other critically, admiringly. When one of the men says he'd like to see the women go down each other he's thrown out.

Chapter 8, 50:42 At a seaside hotel, Nadine pulls the desk clerk, they masturbate in front of each other before she gives him a blow job. Meanwhile, Manu heads out on the town and meets a man in a bar; in what's a favourite move, she pulls out the crotch of her tights and they have sex.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT Baise-Moi was given a 16 rating in France on its release but the courts overthrew this, following a campaign largely instigated by right-wing pressure group Promouvoir. An initial ban, the first of its kind for 28 years in the country, was rescinded and replaced with an X certificate, restricting the film to being screened in porn cinemas. A campaign that included Claire Denis and Jean-Luc Godard saw the 18 certificate reintroduced and the film could finally be shown in salles.

Elsewhere in the world, its route to public screening was even more fraught: the film was pulled from screens in Australia after it had been showing for a month provoking a run on art-house cinemas (police were even called to one venue in Sydney) and banned in some 22 other countries. In Britain, Baise-Moi was awarded an 18 certificate following 10 seconds of cuts in the rape scene; a further 12 seconds were cut for the video release of a gun being inserted into a man's anus before being fired.

Lancaume killed herself in 2005, a week after her 32nd birthday.

KEY QUOTE 'Weird we should meet like that, huh?' - Manu

BONUS CURIO Advertising posters for the film were banned by London Underground for fear of upsetting French tourists: the title, Baise-Moi, translates as 'Fuck me'. (Some territories have it as the extremely unpleasant, 'Rape Me'.)