最近最想看的電影莫過於 Von Trier 這部 Antichrist了。在英國上映前,就有不少的新聞在報導,而一上映,得到的評價就是兩極化。Chris Tookey @ Daily Mail 直接在文章標題上宣稱導演該送去看心理醫生了,瞧他的名字,剛好可以縮寫成 Chris T.呢!而 Sukhdev Sandhu @ Telegraph 則明顯地持相反立場。兩篇文章看下來,讓我對這部片的興趣大增,這種有爭議性的作品當然要瞭解一下!

然而,才一下子我的期待立刻就被怒火給澆熄了!我幫台灣朋友查一下上映日期,卻發現目前預訂在台灣十一月上映的 Antichrist,片名有可能被翻為「撒旦的情與慾」(!?!?)!

咦……原片名應該是「反基督」吧,怎麼會變成「撒旦的情與慾」呢?既然都已經是「反基督」,怎麼又落入基督式的邏輯思維呢?第二,依照我看兩篇評論得到的資訊,重點不是在「情與慾」,而是痛苦,失子的痛苦,對存在不確定的痛苦,對世界的秩序感到混亂的痛苦等等,而不是情和慾吧。如果不知道本片在講什麼,那就請「直譯」好嗎?身為一個創作者,影片飄洋過海的同時,名字也被亂改了,還改得充滿謬誤,到底是不是「撒旦」「情」「慾」,應該留給觀眾自己去評斷吧。過度商業的考量,感覺發行片商好像把台灣觀眾都當白痴,不能自己判斷一部片的價值,一定要有「煽情」大家才要進電影院!太可笑了吧!

而更可笑的事還在後面:


 

嗯嗯…國家是美國…Von Trier 是丹麥人,女主角是生在英國的法國人,男主角是美國人,拍攝地點在德國,電影公司是丹麥公司Zentropa Entertainments,我不懂到底哪裡決定這部片是美國片?而不管是 IMDB 或是 WIKI,在「country」這一條目,都是列「Denmark | Germany | France | Sweden | Italy | Poland」:



 

嗯嗯,難道Kingnet覺得「歐洲」是美國的分部嗎?如果懶得寫那麼多國名,寫一個歐洲也行啊。寫一個人家都沒列出來的國名,到底是什麼意思呢??

這時候,來看一下簡體字的網頁:


 

雖然我對簡體字很反感,但是每每發現簡體字的資訊常比台灣的要準確多了,更不要說找偏學術性的資料時,人家的深度和廣度、多樣性都比台灣要豐富…我真的很無奈,這樣一件小事,都非常半調子的我們,是不是在其他方面,也更隨便呢??

 

發一點小牢騷啦!!我所提到的兩篇影評,節錄於此:


Antichrist: The man who made this horrible, misogynistic film needs to see a shrink

By Chris Tookey
Last updated at 12:23 PM on 24th July 2009

Antichrist (18)

Lars Von Trier announced after this movie's Cannes premiere that he is the greatest director in the world, a statement that was greeted with well-justified gasps. On the evidence of this week's releases, he's not even the best director in Denmark.

In his defence, he is imaginative.

Even in this most maligned of all his films, the demonic Dane and his Oscar-winning cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (who did excellent, though very different, work on Slumdog Millionaire) have created a few images of startling beauty, alongside other framings that I would much rather didn't linger in my memory.

Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe in Lars von Trier?s Antichrist. Photo by Christian Geisnaes

Mad, bad and dangerous: Things take a nasty turn for Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe in Lars von Trier's Antichrist

Parts of the picture are exquisitely crafted. They have a lyricism and a milky, dreamlike quality that evoke memories of the Russian film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky, to whom the film is dedicated.

So why did Antichrist arouse jeers and critical catcalls at Cannes, especially from the French, who are not easily offended? And why has it brought forth so many demands that it be banned?

It is partly because Von Trier has earned himself an unenviable reputation for misogyny through Breaking The Waves, Dancer In The Dark and Dogville. Of all his films, Antichrist is the most openly, psychopathically hostile towards women.

Antichrist is a bonkers attempt to merge three extremely different genres - arthouse, horror and hard-core pornography - with predictably catastrophic results. It is too slow and boring in its first two-thirds to appeal to fans of horror and pornographic erotica, yet too crude and violent in its final third to satisfy those who pride themselves on having an art-house sensibility.

Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe in Lars von Trier's Antichrist.

Antichrist is a bonkers attempt to merge three extremely different genres - arthouse, horror and hard-core pornography

The schizophrenic confusion of the film is foreshadowed in its prologue, a lustrous, black-and-white sequence of a married couple (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) making love, into which Von Trier tastelessly inserts a single shot of hard-core pornography. This features two body-doubles named Horst Stramka and Mandy Starship.

The effect of this clumsy insertion is not so much erotic as laughable. It does nothing for the film except serve early warning that some sequences are going to be unnecessarily graphic. 

The sequence is also pretentious, bordering on kitsch, and gratuitously-hostile to women. While the couple make love, their baby son is drawn to a window by the beauty of nature - in the form of falling snow. When the child falls, it is a slo-mo, art-house, aestheticised death.

Intercut with the fatality are shots of Charlotte Gainsbourg's face in a state of erotic exultation. The creepy implication is that somehow she and her child are being punished for her taking pleasure in sex.

This is the first hint of misogyny, but it certainly isn't the last.

 Antichrist

The black-and-white prologue is pretentious, bordering on kitsch and shows Charlotte Gainsbourg taking pleasure from sex while her baby son dies

The film that follows is a lengthy, verbose and extremely tedious representation of two souls descending into hell. The expressionistic visuals present images of naked bodies in torment that have a ponderously obvious affinity with the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch.

Both of Von Trier's characters are driven mad by grief. The man, unable to express his despair at the death of his child, devotes himself to controlling his wife's more flamboyant emotions. As a psychotherapist, he tries to 'cure' her, while not tending to his own increasing fear that nature is cruel, if not downright Satanic.

As they repair to their hut in the woods, ironically called Eden, he has visions of a deer carrying a stillborn faun and a fox that eats its own entrails and tells him 'Chaos reigns' - a line that is meant to be chilling, but is delivered with such preposterous solemnity that it invites laughter.

 

As if such hallucinations aren't enough to unsettle anyone, he discovers that his wife - who has been researching an academic work on witchcraft and the medieval fear of women - has come to regard herself, and all women, as satanically evil.

He also finds out she was secretly, or perhaps unknowingly, torturing their baby son by dressing him in shoes that deformed his feet. For her part, with her pale face and lank hair, she looks increasingly like one of the mad, oriental women in Japanese horror flicks, and takes hideous, disproportionate revenge on her husband for his kindly but controlling attitude.

She castrates, impales and cripples him, before punishing herself with a repulsive scene of sexual self-mutilation, shown in grisly close-up. He responds by strangling her to death and burning her body.

 Antichrist

The film is a lengthy, verbose and extremely tedious representation of two souls descending into hell

Normally, I would not give away the film's ending, but it is right that you should be warned about its extreme brutality, and these late scenes are the ones that have aroused the most controversy.

In its defence, Antichrist turns out to be not the picture that I have seen vilified in the Press, sometimes by writers who lack any context of recent cinema with which to compare it, and in at least one case by someone who hadn't even taken the elementary step of seeing it.

For a start, this is not torture porn. The nastiest aspect of torture porn - as manifested in films such as Hostel and Scar 3D - is that it invites the audience to take a voyeuristic, sadistic and quasi-sexual delight in violence and mutilation. Usually, though not invariably, it involves men inflicting extreme pain on women.

In Antichrist, by contrast, the torture is carried out by a woman on a man, and by the woman upon herself. These scenes are extremely graphic, but they are deliberately made unpleasant to watch, and profoundly unerotic. The audience's sympathies are clearly meant to be with the male suffering the violence, at least up to the point when he turns the tables.

It is a moot point, then, whether his violent reprisal constitutes a justifiable act of revenge, or reflects the underlying misogyny of the writer-director. Probably, it's both.

The British Board of Film Classification does have guidelines, and these require cuts in 'portrayals of sexual or sexualized violence which might, for example, eroticise or endorse sexual assault'.

However, the BBFC has been disregarding its own guidelines for at least five years. Indeed, they tried to evade enforcement of them as early as 1996, when they awarded an 18 certificate to David Cronenberg's notorious eroticisation of non-consensual sexual mutilation, Crash.

The sad truth is that there is nothing in Antichrist that this pathetically ineffectual organisation, funded by the film companies and seemingly unaccountable to the public, has not let through before, with an 18 certificate.

We've already had graphic images of castration (in, for example, Waz, Captivity and Hostel II), genital self-mutilation (in The Piano Teacher), hard-core pornography (in Shortbus, Destricted and Von Trier's own The Idiots) and women torturing men for pleasure (in Saw III, Straightheads and Baise-Moi).

Antichrist is a horrible combination of extraordinarily unpleasant elements. It's offensively misogynistic. It's needlessly graphic in its use of violence. And its maker almost certainly needs psychiatric help.

But if I were you, I would just give it a miss.

Verdict: Hell

Rating: 1 out of 5

Antichrist, review

Lars von Trier creates a world that is true to its own ghastly logic in Antichrist.


Lars von Trier; Charlotte Gainsbourg; Willem Dafoe; Rating: * * * *

Antichrist, like many films by its Danish director Lars von Trier, has had the foaming-mouthed witch burners of the popular press out in full, end-of-the-world effect. It is, they hiss and scream with the moral certainty of which only the most self-regarding ideologues are ever capable, a work of pornography.

Worse than that — this is Britain, after all — it’s pretentious. Decadence, moral decay, collective wrack and ruin: the film has been characterized as cinematic swine flu that threatens to destroy our nation and, according to one loon hired by a paper that claims to represent Middle England, confirms the low opinion of our nation held by “our jihadist enemies”.

Let’s ignore the fact that Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban are yet to go on record with their critical judgments on contemporary Danish auteur cinema (although it’s possible, I suppose, that they would approve of 'The Vow of Chastity’ which the Dogme group, one of whose founding members was Von Trier, drew up in 1995).

Antichrist deserves better than to be treated as an occasion for silly-season panics about art-house transgression. But it’s also far too ambiguous and troubling for it to be to canonized as a masterpiece or, just in order it to defend it from its shrilly one-dimensional critics, championed as a cause célèbre.

Structured, like so many of von Trier’s films, as a series of chapters, the first three of which are 'Grief’, 'Pain’ and 'Despair’, it begins in ecstasy and agony. An unnamed married couple (Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe) are shown making love at the same time that their young son climbs from his cot and onto a table before tumbling through the window of their apartment.

The woman’s cry of orgasmic pleasure (let us not forget that the French describe orgasm as 'la petite mort’) gives way to cries of sorrow and suffering. She is medicated, kept in hospital. Her husband is a therapist and uses the language and techniques of his profession to try to heal her. Eventually, he decides that they should spend time in their forest retreat to work through their grief.

The place, called Eden, is anything but. The trees glower and grimace, with every breeze or gust of wind sounding like an impending hurricane. Acorns drop like bombs on the roofs of the cabin where the couple sleep fitfully. The husband, out walking, stumbles across a bloodied deer, fox and crows.

What happens next is painful to describe and even more painful to watch. It involves masochistic sex, violent masturbation, power drills and grindstones and genital mutilation. If, in their graphic extremism, these extended scenes recall Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005 and 2007) movies, their morbidity and troubling psychology is closer in kind to Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001).

Abrupt, sexually candid (there is a penetration shot within the first thirty seconds), and ranging uneasily between realism and expressionism, Antichrist also explores some of the emotional and psychological terrain of Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973).

For this is a film soaked in the grief of its subjects. It is shaken and destabilized by their misery, a misery whose demented darkness von Trier viscerally understands. It portrays the couple’s raw isolation with so little mercy that some viewers will liken the experience to sadism. The man and woman cross a threshold beyond which nothing — medicine, reason, modern-day morality — can no longer offer provide mooring.

The film gets its title from Nietzche’s The Anti Christ (1895), a copy of which von Trier claims to have kept on his bedside table since he was twelve. Certainly, the zone the couple enters is wildly, elementally pre- or even anti-Christian. Subliminal shots of haunted visages; slabs of grinding drone sounds; an image of the man and woman making love among a mesh of tree roots across which other limbs are visible: I felt as if I was lost inside Brueghel’s The Triumph of Death (c.1562)

Von Trier, going back to early works such as Medea (1987) and television series The Kingdom (1994 and 1997), has always drawn on elements of horror and ultra-black grotesque for his social satires. Here he moves away from the studio-bound theatricality of Dogville (2003) and Manderlay(2005), and the experimental tricksiness of The Boss of it All (2006), and goes all out to create a terrifying and pitch-black universe in which nature is described as being “Satan’s church”.

There’s more of this kind of apocalyptic language. At one point, the woman hears a cry. It is, she says, “the cry of all things that are to die”. It’s tempting to laugh, just as we may well laugh when a fox faces the camera and intones, “Chaos reigns”.

It’s a jaw-dropping moment, utterly absurd by the norms of 'straight’ cinema and of modern society. And yet, throughout much of history, mankind has believed in talking animals and in beasts as truth-tellers. My laughter was tinged with a fear - that I was a fool to laugh.

This is von Trier’s biggest accomplishment. He has created a world that is true to its own ghastly, shifting logic. It’s a world that paints a bleak, violent and to some eyes misogynistic portrait of the relationship between men and women.

The intellectual frameworks, psychological tenets and medical language that the husband uses to cure his wife are portrayed as mind control, mere cant at best. The wife’s brutality is eye-watering, but also, we may speculate, an attempt on behalf of women across the centuries to avenge the cruelty meted on them by men.

The actors face up well to the demanding subject matter. Defoe treads carefully to make his character neither likeable nor the monster his wife claims. Gainsbourg, as the student writing a dissertation on medieval misogyny, convincingly falls under the spell of her research topic. Her skin dry and thin as cheap paper, her voice scratchy and undernourished: she is scary and compelling.

Cinematographer Antony Dod Mantle does wonders to make the film look both familiar and hypnotically other-worldly, subtly tilting and bending the dimensions of every space so that we feel we, as much as the characters, are being sucked in, consumed even, by the landscapes.

Antichrist is a film that will likely baffle and enrage some filmgoers less for its violence as its utter disregard for the orthodoxies and pieties that govern contemporary cinema. Von Trier’s enemy is not conservatism as much as liberalism. His world reverberates with cries and sorrow. It is a place where the future will never mend the ailments of the present. It is inhabited by mutually - and eternally - destructive men and women.


 

 

 

 

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