Thursday, October 22, 2009

ANTICHRIST



In this post- Rio Int'l Film Festival week I went to the cinema with Renato, something that became into a habit in our lives since we were 7 years of age. We saw the newest film by Lars Von Trier ANTICHRIST. Renato had already seen it and had strongly insisted that I also must see the controversal film of the Danish director, founder of the Dogma 95. Like Almodóvar and Tarantino everytime a film by Von Trier comes out I run to the movie theater. This time was not so. ANTICHRIST debuted in Rio in August and only two months after I checked it out. The rush, the stress and tribulations of life not always allow a film screening to be placed in the foreground, even for those whom are on movies. Anyway, I saw the film provided with enough surface information about it and in the nexts 1 hour and 40 minutes I was continuously shocked. While I watched the film I had moments of abyssal disgust , some even to rebel in some scenes and gave serious thought to the possibility to run out to the exit door of the room 2 of Estação Botafogo Theater, what surely would not be the best option. However I got to survive the most difficult moments and, resigned, I experienced the excruciating experience of seeing an artist displaying his particular issue and explicitly shocking. All I saw is still being worked out and computed in my mind and soul, but only now I am able to make some points about that incredible odyssey. Antichrist is not only L ars Von Trier's best film , aesthetically speaking, but a film that drinks a lot in Freud, in a certain Scandinavian mythology and North paganism. Written and filmed at the height of Von Trier's outbreak of depressive, the film shows what the psychic pain is quite striking. Charlotte Gainsbourg forms of the desperation that Von Trier wanted to communicate to the world. Who calls the director of misogynist did not understand that Lars is put a woman on the side of nature (internal and external) that can not be tamed by rationality, represented by man, the psychoanalyst husband in this case. Thus, the Antichrist is the forest, the territory of the fears, the unconscious reservoir of drives not tamed by civilization. We must not forget that the forest also is us, it is out, as a projection of inner fears, and she's in, what can not be named. A true treatise on the horrors and pains of the psyche, in my opinion. In a dialogue between husband psychoanalyst (Willem Dafoe) and his wife writer (Charlotte Gainsbourg), the therapist says the woman who walks with strange dreams. She replies: "The dream no longer of interest to modern psychology. Freud is dead, right?" Maybe that is for most audiences, but certainly not in this film by Lars Von Trier.