Antichrist

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ketkip
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Antichrist

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He says: I have been having terrible nightmares these days.
She says: But that has no bearing on the modern psychology. Freud is dead, right?

Well, Freud might be dead in psychology, but his thought is very much alive in the minds of storytellers and their stories, from Sophocles to Lars von Trier. This conversation between the nameless couple in Antichrist, one of the most unsettling and acclaimed films of the year, leads on this thought to the hidden spaces of human minds.

The couple has lost their toddler son, Nick, to a tragic accident: he fell down the window while they were raptured in love-making. She feels like she saw Nick walk out of his bed, open the baby gate, climb into the window. Just then, her eyes closed with pleasure, they reached a climax...

Her husband loves her. After she collapsed at Nick's funeral, she has spent quite some time in the hospital; and He thinks its time for her to go home. Doctors say her grief is atypical, but He thinks its only natural. She doesn't need any medication. If only she faced her fears, she'd recover from this loss. He, being a therapist, decides to care for her, and takes her away to Eden- their forest cottage, of which she has now developed a phobia.

This wilderness, with its dark remoteness and natural cruelty, becomes a metaphor for her mind. Acorns fall in a disturbing rhythm at night, the days are stark. She says she is getting better, but he isn't convinced. She is obsessed with an imaginary constellation of three beggars- a doe, a fox and a crow representing grief, pain and dispair. He says that there is no such thing- but then, he is the one who sees the doe with a newborn hanging out of her womb, the fox pulling at its own innards, and the crow burried in the fox-hole.

They have no names- for they represent the minds of all men and women, defined by the essentials of their sexes. Her ever unsatiated urge for sexual satisfaction and voilence roots from her condemnation to womanhood; while He is her saviour and her killer. She has screwed in this huge weight to his leg, and no matter how sorry she is, she cant find the wrench to unscrew it. Attached to one another, they must suffer in this garden of Eden, until the three beggars arrive and one of them has to die.

Gynocide- women regarded as the source of evil, and subjected to torture and death- is the topic of her thesis. As she reads and studies, she becomes convinced of her own evil nature. She is the source, she is the evil. Nature is evil, too- its the Satan's child. He tries to convince her otherwise, but to no avail. In her frequent attacks of anxiety She wants him to have her- and he says it won't help. She wants him to hit her- but he says he can't. She walks off naked in the dead of the night. He finds her lying among the roots of the tree, her white body writhing in pain of lust. He hits her, he takes her- right there, under that barren tree; and entangled in the roots are several naked hands.

The image is beautiful, yet perverse. What does he mean? What does she want? Who is the source? Who is the victim? Its impossible to say. Sex means so much more here than two bodies copulating- it brings forth her feelings of guilt and shame; filth and helplessness; loss and yearnig. Her grief is unbearable, pain is sharp, and dispair insane.

Nick's autopsy reports an abnormal development of feet. He thinks that has no bearing on the case, until he sees Nick's photograph in the cottage, taken the previous summer. That's when She had stayed in Eden to finish her thesis- alone with Nick. In the photograph Nick is wearing wrong shoes- left foot in the right shoe, right foot in the left. He asks her about it, and She says it must have been a mistake. But the mistake seems to have been repeated quite often- for Nick's shoes are wrong in all the photographs. Now he knows her worst fears, he knows a little too much. All hell breaks loose, as her fear knows no bounds, and nor does her sadism.

Dedicated to the master of cinematic metaphors, Andrei Tarkovsky, Antichrist is vivid in Freudian iconography. It's not a coincidence that He seeks refuge inside the fox hole, while She beseeches gratification at the roots of the tree. The film brings out issues of gender and sex, taboos and desires, dwelling in the dark corners of mind few would dare to enter. The picturisation is graphic too- showing what one would rather not see. Bold and powerful performances by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourgh realize this living nightmare; while the gray-blue pallette, rain and fog, add to the gloomy, hypnotic sensation. The technique is excellent in its audacity, the soundscape eerie. Lars von Trier experiments with truth and perception, reality and imagination with an astounding command on the medium.

Antichrist is definitely a rare phenomenon- a mind bending adventure, an escapade into the unmapped landscape of human psyche, a cinematic experinec far beyond words.
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