Mark Harris: In defense of Lars von Trier's Antichrist

Lars von Trier may or may not be the world’s greatest living filmmaker, but he is almost certainly the most troubled and complex.

Antichrist, his latest feature, has rather facilely been explained as both an exercise in misogyny and an oblique account of the psychoanalysis that failed to relieve the director of a crippling depression.

These summations are not so much wrong, as woefully incomplete.

For one thing, they fail to take into account the uniqueness of von Trier’s upbringing. This is a man, after all, who converted to Roman Catholicism because everyone else in his family was a Marxist atheist. He is also a son who learned, on his mother’s deathbed, that: a) he wasn’t half-Jewish; and b) that the guy he’d always thought was his father wasn’t.

Famed for his fear of flying, von Trier writes and directs movies critical of the United States without actually going there. He’s invented all kinds of cinematic innovations (the “emotional take”, the fake digital establishing shot) while living a middle class life in the Danish suburbs, even as his imagination manages to encompass mysticism, agitprop, and pornography.

In his two greatest films (Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark), von Trier based his female protagonists to some extent on Maria Falconetti’s interpretation of Joan in Carl Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, a 1928 French biopic with a Danish helmsman. In similar fashion, there is a certain connection between Antichrist and Hí¤xan: Withcraft Through the Ages, a 1922 Danish-Swedish study of the relationship between witchraft and misogyny that was made by another great cinematic Dane, Benjamin Christensen.

In the early 1920s, Hí¤xan met with censorship problems, and it seems certain that Antichrist will as well. The film is often painful to watch, but it is definitely not the simple diatribe it is sometimes made out to be. So watch it first and then decide.