If you're going to ask me who is one of today's most controversial filmmakers, I would not hesitate with my answer: Lars von Trier. His latest film, Antichrist, "managed consistent sell-outs in New York City" [ INDIEWire reports ]. In addition to the box office results, there are two particular reviews I'm very interested about: CNN's and Roger Ebert's...
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CNN called the movie ' an atrocity', while Roger Ebert, who once wrote a scathing review of von Trier's Dogville [ more about this Golden Palm winner after the jump], has this to say:
| More than anything else, I responded to the performances. Feature films may be fiction, but they are certainly documentaries showing actors in front of a camera. Both Dafoe and Gainsbourg have been risk takers, as anyone working with von Trier must be. The ways they're called upon to act in this film are extraordinary. They respond without hesitation. More important, they convince. [ read more ] |
The trailer and more reviews about this controversial movie and of course, von Trier after the jump!
- - - Here's just a few from the now famous 'Atrocity' CNN review:
| This director has often been accused of misogyny for the punishments that befall his heroines -- spuriously, in my opinion. But this time the boot is on the other foot, and for once the charge seems to stick; no matter that the first half of the movie suggests Dafoe's smug therapist is due for a comeuppance.
Apparently someone had a seizure when the movie showed at the New York Film Festival recently. When I caught up with it at the Vancouver International Film Festival two weeks ago, the screening was punctuated with the single loudest shriek I've ever heard in the theatre -- that would have been when Gainsbourg gets out the scissors for a spot of ad hoc auto-surgery. There also was a very vociferous walk-out: a gentleman who fairly barked "You get what you pay for, folks" as he made for the exit a full 20 minutes before the end.
That unhappy camper had a point. Either von Trier is barking up the wrong tree, or he's pandering to the basest instincts of an audience that's seen it all before and still demands more, more, more.
Beautifully shot by Anthony Dod Mantle and acted with raw conviction, "Antichrist" is a calamitous atrocity from a major filmmaker, nothing more and nothing less. If you don't believe me, go ask the talking fox. [ read more ]
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About the Movie: A couple lose their young son when he falls out the window while they have sex in the other room. The mother's grief consigns her to hospital, but her therapist husband brings her home intent on treating her depression himself. To confront her fears they go to stay at their remote cabin in the woods, "Eden", where something untold happened the previous summer. Told in four chapters with a prologue and epilogue, the film details acts of lustful cruelty as the man and woman unfold the darker side of nature outside and within. - - -
On Dogville, Roger Ebert and 'Poetic effect': Senses of Cinema profiled (by Thomas Beltzer) the director and made mention of the following in their review and discussion of Dogville:
| Dogville has been frequently compared to Thornton Wilder's Our Town, but it reminds me more of the brilliantly complex allegories of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. In many of their tales, it is obvious that the characters represent specific ideas, but when we begin to read the tales on an ideological level, their meaning cannot be determined with any certainty. This may be bad religion and bad politics, but it is great art. For example, we know that in Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown", the titular character represents innocence and that his wife, Faith, represents, well, his faith, but what happens in the woods with the devil is inconclusive, as is the final denouement. In Melville's Moby Dick, the white whale is God, and Ahab pursues him to his own death but what does that mean? Von Trier is also working in the realm of complex religious allegory. Tom Edison (Paul Bettany) is Tom Sawyer (note the novel prominently displayed in Edison Senior's [Philip Baker Hall] hands) and the American inventor. Grace (Nicole Kidman) is God's sacramental grace come to Dogville. She becomes "eyes for McCay, a mother for Ben, a friend for Vera, brains for Bill" and reacts to the abuses of the town as only a saint could. However, when we try to interpret Dogville, we find ourselves in the realm of undecidability. This is a good thing. In his afterwards to The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco tells us:
I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.
I think that Dogville certainly has this "poetic effect".
Von Trier went out of his way to ask for a non-literal reading of his film, with its artificial set, British-style narration and ritualistically formal acting and dialogue. Nevertheless, many American reviewers reacted with literal-minded fundamentalism (much like the Islamic fundamentalists reacted to Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses). Roger Ebert is a telling example of America's post-Trade Centre attack jingoism. In his review of Dogville, he claims that von Trier "approaches the ideological subtlety of a raving prophet on a street corner." Ebert goes on to reveal his own inability to perceive subtlety when he writes "I doubt that we [Americans] have any villages where the helpless visitor would eventually be chained to a bed and raped by every man in town." In my view this is an impossibly literal reading of the film and an assumption that the presentation of the town Dogville is an attempt to realistically portray America. Also, many reviewers seem to be caught up in the fact that Von Trier has never been to America, so "how dare he say anything about us!" In an interview at Cannes Film Festival 2005, the filmmaker articulated his defense and how he and many others in the rest of the world feel:
America is sitting on our world. I am making films that have to do with America [because] 60% of my life is America. So I am in fact an American, but I can't go there to vote, I can't change anything. I am an American, so that is why I make films about America.
A quick scan of reviews reveals just how complex and subtle Dogville actually is. James Berardinelli, on his website Reelviews, muses, "What does it all mean? The film is cleverly developed so that there are at least two apparent interpretations" and goes on to suggest that Grace could either represent the oppressed masses or North America, as in the formerly exploited and now oppressing North America. Stephen Holden of The New York Times reads it as "depicting as a lie the ideal of embracing human community (and especially the cozy, cookie-baking dream of small-town America)" and that its message is "that good people are resented for their virtue." Elbert Ventura of Allmovie.com, says that it "comments on the essential hypocrisy and meanness of America" but that the end-credit photo montage presented to the tune of David Bowie's "Young Americans" asks for "a more limited reading." [ read more ]
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- - - What's on your mind? What are some of your reactions after watching the trailer above? Are you a fan of filmmaker Lars von Trier? What movies of von Trier have you seen already? Let us know what you think! - - - |
