excerpts from
THE SIX COMMANDMENTS OF THE CHURCH OF THE ANTICHRIST
by Larry Gross
Film Comment, September/October 2009
. . .
Lars von Trier . . . can’t seem to shut up about his beliefs, his lack of beliefs, his sincerity, his upbringing in a paradoxically rigid hippie commune, his phobias, his dishonest mommy (on her deathbed in 1995, she revealed that her husband was not von Trier’s biological father).
He doled out endless amounts of this at Cannes, as if Antichrist couldn’t stand on its own. Von Trier has become a Nabokovian invention, fostering the image of himself as a fraudulent wannabe, when—wonder of wonders—artistically, he’s the real deal. Most of us mediocrities do our best to be taken seriously. Von Trier, who’s made more great or near-great films than any European director under 60 except Almodóvar, does a perfect imitation of a fake.
. . .
Von Trier was obviously venturing beyond himself and into masterpiece territory in Dogville with the introduction of the Paul Bettany character, whose mixture of tenderness and cruelty, intelligence and myopia, altruism and egotism, strongly implicates us in a way no other masculine figure in the director’s work ever had done before. Unlike any other von Trier film, Dogville incorporates the image of a believable masculine norm that might conceivably link up with feminine spiritual power and grace. The subsequent collapse of that alliance is excruciatingly sad, granting Dogville a depth and universality unique in von Trier’s films.
. . .
In his films, is Lars von Trier religious? is that why Antichrist is dedicated to Tarkovksy, whose religious orthodoxy was aggressive and indisputable? No. Von Trier is more of a magical realist who ransacks the images and tropes of religion to enable the smashing of realist aesthetic conventions. . . .
It’s when the supernatural becomes transparently and literally “true” (the ending of Breaking the Waves, the musical numbers in Dancer, or the faceless women who “reclaim” Nature at the end of Antichrist) that he becomes temporarily idiotic. What von Trier does have in common with Tarkovsky is a compulsive hatred of secular power structures for their irredeemably hypocritical pettiness and cruelty. . . .