Edinburgh International Film Festival
“I am the greatest director in the world,” Lars von Trier declared in an already notorious Cannes press conference following the unveiling of “Antichrist” in May. Unable to resist such shameless baiting, most critics either responded with affectionate exasperation (“Oh, Lars!”) or, as one suspects von Trier preferred, tomato-faced indignation.
What few did, however, was entertain the possibility that he might be telling the truth. It’s a conclusion that, even on the imperfect evidence of “Antichrist,” this viewer is willing to consider.
Few contemporary filmmakers are as adept at arousing feeling as Lars von Trier – by which I refer not merely to the ingenious media-provocateur act he performs to market his work, but the actual excesses and polarities of emotion he mines within his own cinema.
Von Trier’s best films arouse equal measures of devotion and resentment because they engage human empathy with no concessions whatsoever to conventional artistic standards of restraint or good taste; like their psychologically frail heroines – Bess in “Breaking the Waves,” Selma in “Dancer in the Dark,” Grace in “Dogville” – they teeter on the brink of self-destruction simply because they feel too much.
I must slightly temper that argument upfront by admitting that “Antichrist,” as mercurial and bruising as it so often is, is not one of von Trier’s very best. Though it by and large meets the criteria described above – and its unnamed anti-heroine is a fascinating, near-parodic amalgamation of physical traits and psychological symptoms from all the director’s women – it lacks the emotional breadth of “Breaking the Waves,” or the formal and ideological conviction of “Dogville.” Unusually for von Trier, for all the film’s sledgehammer brutality in its concluding chapters, it’s rather coy about what it actually wants to say.