Lars Von Trier's Antichrist has been sitting in my head since I first saw it three years ago while I wondered around trying to figure out what to do with it. Widely mocked and reviled in 2009, though not by everybody, Von Trier's genuinely shocking and unnerving horror film has struggled to shrug off its tiresome reputation as controversial so that it can be approached on its own terms, for better or worse, or both. Probably both. In any case, I liked Antichrist a great deal in 2009, and then promptly ran away from it, not happy with much of what I was reading about the film but singularly unwilling -- I claimed to myself, modestly, that it was more like I was unable, but I also didn't try very hard -- to offer up any kind of productive retort. Well, I was never proud of that reaction, so I watched the film again tonight, and so now I, like...I don't fucking know, man.

Well, that's not entirely true. The best, and easiest, way for me to approach Antichrist is as a horror film. It's a horror film about grief, a not entirely unheard of realm for the genre, but certainly not that common. The story is broken up into chapters bearing titles like "Grief," "Pain," plus other, less literal ones, and features also a prologue and epilogue, filmed, unlike the rest of the movie, in black and white, and each set to Handel's aria "Let Me Weep," a title which itself could also function as a plea from Charlotte Gainsbourg's character to her husband, played by Willem Dafoe. The prologue shows Gainsbourg and Dafoe (unnamed in the film, referred in the credits as simply "She" and "He," a bit of on-the-nose branding for which Von Trier took some heat, though I think it's worth reminding those unhappy with the choice that this is only in the closing credits, and perhaps shouldn't be held against the body of the film) having sex, oblivious to the fact that their infant son Nick has climbed from his crib, climbed into an open window that has been blown open during a snowstorm, and fallen to his death. Apart from the beauty of the imagery, this prologue is notable for including a close-up shot of graphic sex, doubled by a pair of porn actors. It's the first, and least, of several moments throughout Antichrist that earned hoots of outrage (something like that) from several critics and general audience members, and it manages to, on first viewing, seem entirely gratuitous, and to remain that way on second viewing, but to also be very clearly relevant as the film goes along.

When we return to Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, Gainsbourg is shattered by grief and Dafoe, a therapist by profession, is trying to lift her out of it. He appears to have shunted aside his own intense mourning for the sake of his wife, but Dafoe's character, when Antichrist is written about, tends to take a beating from critics. He's perceived as arrogant, and at one point Gainsbourg charges him with this directly, and perhaps he is, but he's also superhumanly patient with his wife whose grief can loose itself with astonishing cruelty. Early on, she tells Dafoe that the previous summer, which she spent with Nick at a cabin secluded in the woods, he was a distant husband and father, and that since this turned out to be the last summer of Nick's life, his choice turned out to be really kind of too bad. Further, Gainsbourg asserts, Dafoe is indifferent to their son's death, a claim which an earlier shot of Dafoe at the funeral would seem to belie. Anyway, I'm quite willing to admit that Dafoe's character might be a bit full of himself, and that by the time the end credits roll it's hard to not think, the results being what they turn out to be, that there must be better therapists out there. But I wonder about the idea that Dafoe is somehow uncaring, although taking his side at this point can't help but turn problematic as the film eventually opens up to its subject.

Which is. When Gainsbourg was in the cabin during the last summer of her son's life, her goal was to work on her thesis. The bulk of the film involves Dafoe taking her back to the cabin in the woods, which she now, following Nick's death, claims to be afraid of. Among the things that happen in the cabin is that Dafoe finds the work she left behind -- abandoned, really, because she says Dafoe made her feel that her subject was stupid. The thesis was to be about misogyny throughout history, and the aspect of human nature that allows some to commit acts of evil against women. But Gainsbourg has come to believe that women are inherently evil, and that the misogyny she was studying was justified. Somehow. Dafoe himself tries, with some element of desperation, to argue her out of this, but even he begins to wonder -- and even the audience wonders, or is meant to wonder, or is provoked to wonder (that one, probably) -- if she might be on to something when he is reading the autopsy report on their son, and sees that the pathologist noted a deformity in his son's feet, something that is not connected to the accident, but is mentioned in passing. Inspired by this revelation, which he didn't know anything about (and why not?), Dafoe then notices in various pictures of Nick that his son was wearing his shoes on the wrong feet. He sees this over and over, and asks Gainsbourg about it. She chalks it up to a thoughtless day, but these photos are from various days during her trip with Nick the summer before. Von Trier even treats us to a flashback (but from whose perspective? Are we seeing what happened, or what Dafoe has assumed must have happened?) of Gainsbourg putting Nick's shoes on incorrectly, and the poor boy crying out in pain as his flesh and muscles and bones are forced into unnatural angles. Over a period of many, many months, we can assume.

But when we see Dafoe pondering the autopsy report, this, too, is a flashback. He's in the cabin at the time, but at least some of his conversations with her must be colored by this knowledge. But which conversations? Practically every one of Dafoe's reactions to something extreme, before Antichrist really approaches the concept of extremity with its eyes wide open, is unusual in its distance. His wife's early cruelty is absorbed by his role as a professional therapist, which, fair enough, but Antichrist is a horror film not just of the psychological variety, but of the supernatural variety as well, and it is Dafoe who is confronted by an eviscerated fox who speaks to him, saying "Chaos reigns." His reaction to this is something less than what you might expect. This experience is also absorbed, somewhere, somehow. It could be that he's simply taking the fox's rebuke to heart, given that his own attempts to rationally chart out his wife's progress and psychology through her grief aren't panning out exactly as he was positive they would, and plus here's this fox talking to him, basically proving the point it's making at the exact time it's making it. Dafoe's own reserve is maybe based half in professionalism -- Gainsbourg's his wife, but also, as he points out again and again, his patient -- and half in the guilt that is driving his wife mad.

The guilt Gainsbourg feels is only in part of the variety that any parent would likely feel, rationally or not, under the circumstances, but also mainly and specifically from her own sexual desire, which led to the physical act, which left her and Dafoe insensible and therefore oblivious to their son's walk to doom. It's interesting that we're not shown who instigates the sex. Based on Gainsbourg's breakdown, and the source of it, it might be safe to assume she did. Not that it would matter in the least, as far as how she should feel about it, as opposed to what she does, but it's left an open question in any event. For his part, Dafoe refuses to blame her, and reminds her that he was there, too. She perhaps comes around to his point of view when the film follows Gainsbourg into madness and shows her final attempt to (violently) have sex with her husband descend into hell. The couple have sex often in the film, against Dafoe's better therapeutic judgment, because Dafoe says that he can appreciate that she finds it to be a distraction. For more reasons than just that one, "distraction" is probably the word Gainsbourg is prepared to forever associate with sex, and so she finally decides to blame sex itself, maybe, and she grabs a log and smashes her husband's erect penis, shocking him into unconsciousness. More follows, which I won't get into, but it's interesting to me that in all the hubbub that kicked up around Antichrist and its very graphic nature, the subsequent self-mutilation of her own genitals is the one always pointed to, when by my count two separate, and opposite, pairs of genitalia are pretty badly mistreated. I found one no less horrifying than the other but what happens to Dafoe is somehow not a step too far, but what Gainsbourg does to herself is. If Antichrist is misogynistic, as it's often charged with being, and with some reason, it maybe clears the path to judgment if you limit your disgust to the mistreatment of just the one gender.

Oh, but there's more, much more to try and reconcile. Because as I said early on, and then seem to have promptly forgotten about, Antichrist is a horror film, and it signals this, well before the violence, in a number of ways both subtle and not. As always with horror films, one of the questions is, what is the source of the horror? So for instance in relation to Dracula, the answer to that question would be Dracula the Vampire. In Antichrist, what is it? Until the chips are really down, the only character who expresses fear is Gainsbourg. Her fear, she claims, is of the woods where the cabin is located (an area called Eden, which is, yes, a bit much, but which is also very easily and very profitably gotten over). Later and more directly, Gainsbourg says that "nature is Satan's church." Many people reacted to this line with something akin to "Pffff! No it's not!" but I myself am unclear why such a line should not appear in a horror film of this type, which is the kind that is about nature and ancient evil and is called Antichrist. Plus, hey, she might be right. When the two are hiking to the cabin early in the film, once they reach the patch of land that is technically called Eden, Gainsbourg says that the ground is burning. Dafoe assumes this is part of her temporary psychosis, but when she takes off her boot and sock she does, indeed, have blisters. But maybe that's just from hiking. And indeed, later stabs at therapy seems to remove this particular danger, so maybe Dafoe is right. Which is a thing that would be easier to accept if later both Dafoe and myself didn't see, with our own eyes, that fox say "Chaos reigns." And so all I can think about is that in horror movies when something unholy attempts to step onto holy ground, or is touched by some kind of holy object, the unholy thing burns. Of course, if I'm onto anything here, and if nature is Satan's church, which there are eventually decent reasons to at least consider being the case, this would make Gainsbourg holy. The church of the unholy must burn the holy. I think that's the essential idea behind Hell.

This leads me now, again, to consider the source of the horror, and to consider how far back it goes. Gainsbourg was (possibly?) (intentionally?) torturing her son by making him wear his shoes wrong well before we, the audience, witness anything going wrong in the lives of this family. Yet we're told that Gainsbourg experienced a severe and radical rethinking of her thesis on misogyny (titled "Gynocide", by the way), and she did this in the cabin, in Eden, a place that, when she's away from it, she's afraid to return to. Dafoe is shocked to hear that his wife has come to accept misogyny as just, which of course means that, at least to his eyes, this is entirely unlike her. Now, of course, we're given reasons to believe that Dafoe doesn't know quite as much about his wife as he's so very confident he does, but I don't think too many people would regard a woman's moving from a feminist chronicler of historical misogyny to one who believes that maybe ancient witch-burners might have kind of had a point as part of the natural drift of personality. And it is at around this same time that she began to put Nick's shoes on backwards. And it is at this point that Antichrist becomes a film about demonic possession. Very literally, as literally as The Exorcist. Gainsbourg has been targeted, and her eventual self-hatred, and her guilt, and perhaps even her decision to have the kind of sex that obliterates all other thoughts or considerations or obligations that would allow her to forget for a while that she even had a child, is all part of the lingering, somewhat weakened by distance, power of Satan's church. Which is not nature as a whole, but Eden. The film's epilogue shows Dafoe encountering a flood of faceless women walking into Eden, the victims, it would appear, of the same ancient evil.

Under these circumstances, perhaps Nick's death was inevitable. What happened afterwards, though, was perhaps not, had Dafoe thought of some other form of therapy than to drag her back to the place that terrified her the most. It might have done them both a world of good if he'd simply let her weep.

Lars von Trier, you must admit, has had a very strange career. He currently enjoys a place as a filmmaker with one of the year's most celebrated films (Melancholia, which I still haven't seen, goddamnit) and as a filmmaker with one of the most reviled, or at least distrusted, personalities and artistic philosophies and psychologies. This last is largely a product of ill-timed and unfortunately public jokes, Von Trier's taste for provocation, and a deeply wearying global self-righteousness which has flipped the generally accepted principle that what you do means more than what you say.

But anyway. That's all just what's going on right now, and the strangeness of Von Trier extends way back. There's always a lot going on in any given Von Trier film, many reflecting his various social prejudices or fetishes or fears (maybe "terrors" works better), as well as, always, all the sources of his despair. But the central struggle of Von Trier as an artist is stylistic. Still known, eleven years after he made a film even remotely in this mode, for the Dogme set of artistic rules he devised back in the mid-1990s, Von Trier has gone from seeming to want to send up filmmaking convention, to dispensing with it -- sort of, or so he thought, or so he said he thought, but you never really know now do you? -- to throttling the very life from its bones, to shooting electricity through it to see if it could be made to kick again, Von Trier seems to have for now settled into a kind of style of classical composition and photographic beauty (he did this first, by my count, with Antichrist. Of all things, need I add). Back with Dogme, the rules of which were picked up by several other like-minded Danish filmmakers, the idea was to strip away everything that made films, to Von Trier's way of thinking, boring and predictable. What he was stripping away sometimes made sense, under the circumstances, such as no artificial light, and sometimes seemed entirely arbitrary and pointlessly limiting, like no guns, and anyway, in the end, did not achieve the clear-eyed, kitchen-sink realism that a lot of people mistakenly believed was the goal. Dogme was, if anything, a phase, and a way for Von Trier to reinvigorate himself. It's like when you hear artists talk about working on tight budgets, or under the thumb of censorship, and how this forces them to be more creative, although in Von Trier's case the restrictions were self-imposed, and the true creativity seems to have followed the mantle of Dogme being shrugged off, or more accurately slowly chipped away.

But what led to Dogme, anyhow? Von Trier's stated reasons don't interest me too terribly much, but what does interest me is that the Von Trier film that directly precedes Breaking the Waves, his first Dogme film (barring some Danish TV work) is Europa, the least Dogme-like film you could imagine, in that it is so aggressively artificial both in style and content, but mostly style, that it's not hard to imagine Von Trier looking at the film upon its completion and desperately choking down a scream. If anything like that happened, I know how he felt.

What Europa is, is The Good German as if it had been directed by Guy Maddin. Maddin's hyperventilating, fever dream take on silent film aesthetics is not only content to hold on to the rough edges, as compared to today, of the early days of filmmaking, to the point where he wants to twist the relatively primitive technology to perform grotesque acts. In Europa, Von Trier sort of gets that, but he still wants to keep the polish of Hollywood's golden age. This leads to moments of characters walking in place in front of a rear projection in a setting where, in a Hollywood film from the 30s and 40s, no rear projection would be used. Verisimilitude is hardly Von Trier's top priority, though, because Europa operates as, and wants to evoke, a dream.

It tells the story of Leopold Kessler (Jean-Marc Barr), an American of German extraction who travels to Germany shortly after World War II has ended. A dull, naive, and therefore easily led young man, Leopold comes under the wing of his shady and very Teutonic, with all that implies in relation to World War II, uncle (Ernst-Hugo Järegard) who gets him a job on a train as a sleeper car conductor, a gig were led to believe is kind of plum. The train is part of the Zentropa line, which is owned by the troubled Hartmann family, whose members include Max (Jorgen Reenberg), the mournful patriarch; son Lawrence, played by Udo Kier and notable mainly because Udo Kier's Udo Kier-ness not only doesn't, but is never asked to shine through; and daughter Katharina (Barbara Sukowa), with whom Leopold will fall in love, and whose loyalty to Germany, not just generally but possibly Germany as it had just very recently been, becomes the cause of some distress. As does, not unrelated, the presence of a band of underground Nazi terrorists known as "werwolfs" (or "werwolfen"? I don't believe the plural is ever spoken). Leopold will eventually be approached by the American military, in the person of Eddie Constatine (who in 1991 looked a whole lot like Järegard), to try to infiltrate the Nazi group, and will be approached by the Nazi group to plant a bomb. Until the film's ending, Leopold is, as I've said, such a weasley, inactive little turd that his eventual crack-up leads to a brief moment of basically impotent aggression that briefly put me in mind of Saving Private Ryan's Cpl. Upham.

So. I found Europa largely infuriating. It has elements that are powerfully, dreamily haunted -- Max von Sydow as the hypnotic narrator doesn't hurt -- and an ending that is entirely gripping. But it is finally too schematic as a story and earnestly willed into being as an exercise in style, and a confused one at that. Classic film techniques as a metaphor for a dreamstate seems workable enough, but the dreamstate itself as a metaphor for post-war Germany specifically and Europe generally, and post-war Germany as a metaphor for any situation that might call for a human being to either take a stand or be swept away...perhaps it's all too much for Von Trier, at least the Von Trier of 1991. Not to mention the fact that it's pretty much impossible to invest oneself emotionally in anything to do with Leopold, let alone the eventual romance that is supposed to pack any sort of punch. Aggressive artificiality and sincere emotional stakes don't need to be mutually exclusive, but they are in Europa.

Boy, the ending's good, though. It's hard to see much of what would become Dogme in those few minutes, but you can see what Von Trier would finally leave Dogme behind in favor of. He would take baby steps away from Dogme with the, let's face it, entirely wretched Dancer in the Dark, which attempted to match Dogme's realism (or "realism") with not just melodrama but the musical, too (more Dennis Potter than Stanley Donen, though) before almost seeming to send up his own rules with his masterpiece Dogville, a film that keeps guns and artificial lighting but sweeps away a good deal more of the things one might expect a movie to have. It's frankly been fascinating to watch Von Trier over the years trying to decided what things -- and by "things" I mean actual, physical things -- a movie needs, before deciding, at least for now, that it's okay for movies to have the kinds of things that movies usually have, and see what he can do with that. Antichrist, apparently. A film for another day, perhaps, but I will say that if movies like Antichrist are the end result of Von Trier's struggle, then it has been well worth it.

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TIFF Lightbox just started a Von Trier program and are screening most of his work, including Melancholia and the hard to find The Idiots, as well as Europa, which is playing Nov. 12 and 17.

I like Lars von Trier. Or I think I do, at least. I actually still haven't seen the one film of his that most people can at least sort of agree on, Breaking the Waves, and I remember nothing whatsoever about the first film of his I did see, Europa (which went by the name of Zentropa when I caught it), or of the first season of The Kingdom. So almost every scrap of my positive feelings towards him stem from a film that I think only I and three other people liked: Dogville. The hatred directed towards that one really baffles me, as do the charges that it is anti-American. I believe Von Trier probably is anti-American himself (Dogville's asinine follow-up, Manderlay, is evidence of that), but Dogville, while ostensibly set in the US, really has nothing specifically to do with America or Americans -- the film is down on pretty much everybody. It's a deeply, almost cathartically misanthropic film, and I will freely own up to finding such a point of view occasionally bracing. If you don't have a misanthropic bone in your body, then God bless you. I truly envy that. I have one myself -- just the one, though -- and Von Trier's wildly original and gripping film hit it pretty solidly.

(You know, it occurs to me that there's a real danger in taking the old "I don't have a single ______ bone in my body" metaphor in the direction I just took it. I had to re-work that last sentence many times to keep it from sounding like I was talking about my weiner. My misanthropic weiner.)

Point being, a horror film with an honestly, unflinchingly angry or sneering point of view might be interesting, even refreshing, if for no other reason than that most horror films have no point of view whatsoever -- they check the boxes and go on home. Maybe my reaction to Anti-Christ will be to find myself put-off by Von Trier for the way he views humanity, but I honestly believe that's better than hating Anti-Christ because it sucks.

And speaking of Von Trier, don't forget about May's TOERIFC selection, Dancer in the Dark (which I've seen, but will offer no opinion on right now), hosted by the wonderful Pat of the wonderful blog Doodad Kind of Town. That's on May 18th, folks, so mark your calendars.

Finally, I offer a very sincere and hearty congratulations to Fox and Mrs. Fox, who are celebrating their wedding anniversary today. Good on you!