Lars von Trier film "Antichrist" shocks Cannes

Reuters ^

[traumer]

CANNES, France (Reuters) - Danish director Lars von Trier elicited derisive laughter, gasps of disbelief, a smattering of applause and loud boos on Sunday as the credits rolled on his drama "Antichrist" at the Cannes film festival.

The film, starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as a couple seeking to overcome the grief of losing their only child, has quickly become the most talked-about at this year's festival, which ends on May 24.

Cannes' notoriously picky critics and press often react audibly to films during screenings, but Sunday evening's viewing was unusually demonstrative.

Jeers and laughter broke out during scenes ranging from a talking fox to graphically-portrayed sexual mutilation.

Many viewers in the large Debussy cinema also appeared to take objection to von Trier's decision to dedicate his film to the revered Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky. Applause from a handful of viewers was drowned out by booing at the end.

Antichrist opens with a heavily stylized, black-and-white, slow-motion portrayal of the child's accidental death set to soaring music by Handel.

Dafoe's character, who is a therapist, tries to help his wife deal with her grief and encourages her to come off heavy medication that sedates her for weeks after the death.

They decide to go to an isolated wooden cabin in an unspecified forest to recover, but the woman Gainsbourg portrays loses control of her senses.

The abuse she submits herself and her husband to drew shocked gasps from the audience.

[chris_bdba]

Hey perhaps some enterprising person who works in the theatre can splice in a frame of a dedication to Obama?

[buccaneer81]

I have Solaris sitting out ready to watch, is it good or boring?

Not your typical "sci-fi" movie. But the original Russian version beats the hell out of the George Clooney remake.

[ansel12]

I caught a part of that Clooney version and couldn’t finish it.

[buccaneer81]

I caught a part of that Clooney version and couldn’t finish it.

It was bad. The 1972 version is better, but very slow moving.

[Inkie]

He’s not from Hollywood. He doesn’t deign to visit the U.S. He makes films that are supposedly anti-American, but if you analyze the characters and situations, his films (like Dogville) are really a comment on Europeans, like the ones who watched as their neighbors were carted off to gas chambers, then snatched up the victims’ worldly goods for themselves.

[traumer]

in my days it was Ch. Walken.....

[Clemenza]

Aren’t you a DeFoe fan?

[Jabba the Nutt]

Lars von Trier is Danish for Ed Wood.

[puroresu]

Solaris is very good, but you have to go into it with the understanding that it's not typical sci-fi. It's meditative, which some would call slow. Younger viewers raised on MTV with zero attention span probably couldn't watch it. Stalker, Tarkovsky's other sci-fi film, about a trip into an alien area called The Zone, is even slower. Clooney's version of Solaris sucked, but the only thing I've liked him in is O Brother, Where Art Thou. He played an idiot who thought he was smart, so he just had to be himself in that movie. He was fine doing that.

[puroresu]

LOL!

[Borges]

Danish film.

[Borges]

The Danish language has no Aristocratic prefix. Lars Trier added ‘Von’ to his name for its portent.

[Jabba the Nutt]

Von Trier means from Trier. Well, sports fans, who’s the most famous person from Trier?

[Borges]

When Solaris was released, the Soviet apparatchiks labeled it a ‘Socialist Response to 2001: A Space Odyssey’.

[puroresu]

That's funny! I guess the reason HAL went haywire in 2001 is that he wasn't engineered by a socialist!