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!

Secretary: Assuming the position

DIRECTED BY Steven Shainberg, 2002

STARRING Maggie Gyllenhall (Lee Holloway), James Spader (E Edward Grey)

CERTIFICATION 18: Contains strong sexual theme, sex and language

RUN TIME 107 mins approx, Tartan

COVERLINE 'A comedy for everybody's who's been tied up at work'

WHY YOU SHOULD SEE IT Hanky spanky with Jake's sister Maggie, who is reported to be about to star in film Hysteria about the invention of the vibrator.

THE PLOT Lee Holloway is discharged from a psychiatric clinic and enrols in a typing course, where she excels. Her first job interview is with lawyer E Edward Grey; when she arrives his previous secretary is walking out and the office is in disarray. Grey immediately treats Lee as if she's always worked there and she gets the job. There is a connection between them and he soon notices that Lee cuts herself. Lee's father is an alcoholic, her boyfriend, Peter, ineffectual, and her mother sits in her parked car all day waiting to take Lee home again.

After a particularly charged telling off from Grey over her typing mistakes, he calls Lee into his office where he spanks her for the first time. She comes to crave his discipline - he specifies what she can eat at home, she crawls around the office and eats from his hand - but he is frightened by his own needs. He fires her - 'You have to go or I won't stop' - in a scene that mirrors her arrival at his office.

Lee accepts Peter's marriage proposal but, when trying on the wedding dress, leaves Peter's family home and runs to Grey's office. She stages what is portrayed by local media as a hunger strike at his desk; a priest and her father are among those who visit to try and persuade her to come to her senses. Grey finally succumbs after three days and rescues her from her protest; they have sex.

THE FILM All the films I've included here so far feature sexual intercourse but Secretary tackles an area of sexuality, S&M, in a relatively mainstream movie. Mary Gaitskill's short story is the starting-off point for an indie romcom, albeit with a twist, in the hands of director Steven Shainberg.

Lee is reluctant to leave the institution at the film's start, life inside is simple and she misses the structure it affords. It is the day of her sister's wedding, and the mores of smalltown life, which Lee and Mr Grey break, loom large. At the reception, however, Lee is forced to confront her father's alcoholism and it is not long before she breaks out her kit of sharp implements and starts cutting herself (and, even, burning herself on her thigh with a hot metal kettle).

There's an immediate passion between them; Grey doesn't act on it straight away but he does tell Lee to stop cutting herself: 'You're over that now.' He begins to question her about her private life and Lee throws away her kit but when Grey spots her with her fiancé his feelings are expressed in anger: he criticises her typing, the way she dresses, plays with her hair or taps a foot. The aggression leads to the first occasion he calls her into his office and spanks her; they both realise they have crossed a boundary (not for the first time, in his case).

Maggie Gyllenhall's expression throughout the scene is a lesson: there's pain, of course, emotional hurt, disbelief. As the beating becomes harder both are panting with effort and arousal; they're left in a daze at its conclusion and Lee takes Mr Grey's hand momentarily in hers in affirmation. Gyllenhall's performance begins as wonderfully ungainly, she's all legs and no grace, while James Spader overplays the simpering, nervous Grey at first but soon moves to confidence.

Lee embraces their new relationship but Grey is humiliated by it; he exercises relentlessly in an effort to overcome his urges. When they split up, Lee contacts other dominant/submissives but is unsatisfied by their often jokey demands. Sex with Peter is no better: the first time they sleep together she insists it must be in the dark and she keeps her clothes on. 'I didn't hurt you, did I?' Peter asks, when he's come. 'No,' she answers, disappointed.

Where the film itself perhaps disappoints is in its ending: Mr Grey and Lee become part of small town life. Oddly, Lee doesn't go back to work for him but the real cop out is in their sex life: they start having one. On the occasion when Grey beats her bare bottom and wanks over her back in his office, he assures Lee he won't fuck her; 'I'm not into fucking.' The cementing of their relationship, however, arrives when they have intercourse.

KEY SCENES Chapter 6, 46:50 After a moment of indecision, Mr Grey makes Lee bend over his desk, palms flat on the table, a misspelled letter in front of her. He begins to spank her, hard, slowly at first, and then more quickly.

Chapter 8, 1:09:42 Grey again orders Lee to bend over his desk, and this time to pull up her skirt and pull down her tights and pants. He masturbates over her back; Lee then goes to play with herself in the bathroom and makes herself come.

Chapter 11, 1:37:23 Grey bathes a naked Lee and they begin to make love.

FURTHER VIEWING When Edward Grey and his new bride go on honeymoon, one of their acts is tellingly familiar to a scene in Belle de Jour (1967). Lee is tied to a tree and they have sex; in Luis Buñuel's film, Belle (Catherine Deneuve) is famously taken into the woods and beaten while tied to a tree.

KEY QUOTE 'Miss Holloway: good letter' - E Edward Grey

BONUS CURIO Prior to the film's release in Britain, critic Tom Charity suggested to Gyllenhall in an interview in Time Out that her character should have had a shaven pubis. She agreed.

Ma mère: Keeping it in the family

DIRECTED BY Christophe Honoré, 2004

STARRING Isabelle Huppert (Hélène), Louis Garrel (Pierre), Emma de Caunes (Hansi), Joanna Preiss (Réa)
CLASSIFICATION 18: Contains strong sex and incest theme
RUN TIME 110 mins, Revolver
LANGUAGE French

COVERLINE 'There are no boundaries to desire.'

WHY YOU SHOULD WATCH IT Incest is best? Starring one of the world's best current actors, Isabelle Huppert.

THE PLOT When Pierre and his mother Hélène are left in a Spanish island holiday villa after his father dies in a car accident, Pierre's hatred for the latter and adoration for her is soon tempered. 'You must admit that I'm worse than him: I'm a bitch, I'm a slut,' Hélène tells Pierre, as she encourages him to recognise her true, sexual, nature. Initially she entrusts him to the care of her friend Réa, who promises him their first kiss will be on his arse; when a night on the town goes too far, Hélène and Réa leave.

Now Pierre is left with the younger Hansi, who loves him, but their relatively routine courtship also reaches a pitch when the duo beat her friend Loulou badly, and Hansi reveals her previous relationship with Hélène. When Hélène returns to the island, Pierre agrees to sleep with her; she cuts herself so badly that she dies. In the funeral parlour, Pierre is caught wanking beside her dead body.

THE FILM I went to see this with Italian actress ex and she hated it; she barely spoke to me for the rest of the evening. I tried to explain it away saying it was so tawdry that it wasn't worth worrying about, but it really upset her. I hated it, too; though it does bear further scrutiny there is a problem at its core: based on a posthumous novel by Georges Bataille, how do you adapt the notorious surrealist's work for the screen nowadays? Rather like the Marquis de Sade, any faithful rendering would be unscreenable, such is the power of the written word and the imagination. Better, I would suggest, to work in his provocative spirit (something like Catherine Breillat's Anatomy of Hell or much of Lars von Trier's work springs to mind).

If you're determined to proceed, there's the problem of updating his themes. Perhaps, for my Italian girlfriend, the blasphemous scenes with which Bataille peppers his work bore some real feeling but they're inevitably less provocative to the rest of us. After his father's death, Pierre creates a paper cross and kneels before it; it's a parody of prayer. The viewer knows Pierre hated his father, but we're unsure whether he next begins to laugh or cry, or both; and maybe it's not even for his father, but the absurdity of the situation. (Despite his literary reputation and artistic influence, Bataille has only been adapted for cinema a handful of times.)

Nevertheless, Pierre does slump into a real grief, which his mother attempts to lift him from in unorthodox manner. At first she flirts with her son: 'I'd be proud to have you on my arm,' she tells him. 'People would take you for my lover.' (Hélène soons gets herself into a fury that she is too old for him.) In the form of this sort of nonsense, pseudo-porn she then attempts to lead him down a path to sexual liberation.

Pierre deliberately walks to a local nudist beach naked; given the key to his father's study, he wanks urgently over the porn he finds there; after an unfettered night he comes home to throw out the housekeeper and her husband who care deeply for him. It is a deliberately cruel act performed without feeling or ceremony.

Hélène decides to introduce Pierre to Réa, the 'wildest girl' she knows: 'She'll educate you.' When Pierre thinks Réa is coming onto him, she leaves; the rest of his night is a descent into a hell of drunken tourists, filmed in a documentary-like manner (Ma mère was filmed on Gran Canaria, near Sex and Lucía's Formentera).

Pierre's relationship with the apparently wholesome Hansi - Emma de Caunes looks like she's stepped fresh from an Australian daytime soap - is initially mundane; if anything, it's too bourgeois. She gazes happily as he befriends a young child on the beach but Pierre's letters to his mother reveal he's worried the couple are not 'perverse enough', he's letting Hélene down. (During the orgy with Pierre's mother and Réa, Hansi reads Don DeLillo, of all things.)

Hansi says she's prepared to do anything for for Pierre; in the evening she whips her friend Loulou half to death, something she admits she used to do with Hélène, in front of other men. Hélène is jealous she is being supplanted in her son's affections and returns to the island. In an alternate ending included on the DVD, Hélène's death is described by the police as a suicide; it's not the first time Isabelle Huppert plays a character who cuts herself, as she does in Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher (2001).

With its Spanish holiday-island setting, the nudists, Pierre's alienation and irreconcilable sex, Ma mère is reminiscent of professional French provocateur Michel Houellebecq's Lanzarote novella. One of Houellebecq's protagonists, a holidaying Belgian policeman, joins a cult on the island; Pierre, too, acts as if he is replacing one religion with another.

Christophe Honoré went on to direct musical film Les chansons d'amour (2007), so it's surprising how sparse Ma mère's soundtrack is. Barber's Agnus Dei accompanies many shots of the island's dunes; there is Cyndi Lauper covering Edith Piaf, oddly, (Hymn to Love) and, finally, there's the Turtles' Happy Together. Pierre is slumped beside his mother's casket, fist working frenetically in his lap as it plays. You won't know whether to laugh or cry.

KEY SCENES Chapter 6, 44:14 After deserting him on a night out in town, Hélène and Réa find Pierre passed out in a shopping arcade. Hélène decides to strip him while Réa imparts the promised kiss on his arse. She takes her top off and mounts him on the pavement, laughing at a passerby.
Chapter 7, 52:17 Waking up back at the house with another couple they have brought back, which includes Hansi, Pierre starts to have sex with Réa while kissing his mother's body.
Chapter 9, 1:11:50 Hansi and Pierre have sex in her room. Though naked, she is still wearing her riding boots, which she calls Loulou in to remove.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT Garrel, who spends much of this film naked, acting in a hang-dog and whiney manner, is something of a muse for Honoré. This was their first film together, but they've since gone on to make others, including Dans Paris (2006) and Making Plans for Lena (2010). In Les chansons d'amour, Garrel plays a character involved with Ludivine Sagnier and Clotilde Hesme. In bed together, the three read books about other ménages à trois, including Adam Thirlwell's racy and very funny Politics. The film is a brave attempt to revive the musical; the tunes aren't bad and Honoré pulls off the transitions into song deftly, it's the bits in between that aren't great, unfortunately. Dans Paris, on the other hand, is almost entirely successful, and also stars the feted Romain Duris.

KEY QUOTE 'Do you know your mother is nuts?' - Hélène