Stronger stomachs

It may be just a coincidence, but I’ve noticed that, for all the media kerfuffle over its maker’s supposed “woman-hating” agenda, a number of the most level-headed, inquisitive responses to “Antichrist” seems to be coming from female writers. Put it down to thicker skins, stronger stomachs, or nothing whatsoever — I’m just saying. Manohla Dargis, for one, isn’t a great fan of the film, but seems a lot more amused than shocked:

At one point one of the characters ominously refers to nature as Satan’s playground or some such, which sounds like a line from Woody Allen by way of Ingmar Bergman. By the time the animatronic fox warns the understandably baffled-looking Mr. Dafoe that “chaos reigns,” it’s clear we’re not in Kansas anymore or even a serious movie. Chaos reigns, if not narrative sense, but I would be lying if I didn’t admit that this impossible movie kept me hooked from start to finish.

Anne Thompson, meanwhile, defends the film, adding an interesting corrective to the plentiful “misogynist” interpretations:

The movie does hang together. He knows where he’s going. It’s just that much like Ken Russell in The Devils, Trier’s taking you to horrifying, hallucinatory places where anything can happen. (Hieronymous Bosch comes to mind.) And where most people don’t want to go. Accused of misogyny, the film portrays a woman who is man’s worst nightmare, the embodiment of their anxiety about women.

And Karina Longworth announces that she is “on the ‘pro’ side” of the film, and takes a moment to snipe at anyone who thinks she shouldn’t be:

I’m certainly not offended by it, nor do I think other members of my gender necessarily should be. (Before I saw the film, a male journalist told me, in a way that suggested it was beyond opinion, that “no woman” could possible feel positively about it; this statement of “fact” strikes me as more sexist than anything Von Trier actually put on screen.)

On another note, in a handy summary of the film’s media terror attack, the Times of London may declare that “Antichrist” “trumps even the most shocking of films,” but they also remind everyone that the scene causing the most consternation — Charlotte Gainsbourg genital self-mutilation — isn’t a first for cinema, or even for Cannes.

Eight years ago, “The Piano Teacher” featured scenes of Isabelle Huppert slicing her labia with a razor blade — albeit not in quite such graphic detail. The Cannes press, I recall, was minorly fussed, Huppert was rewarded with a Best Actress prize for her pains, and coincidentally enough, heads the jury this year. One can only wonder what she makes of it all.