In Contention

Tag: Manohla Dargis

  • Stronger stomachs

    Charlotte Gainsbourg in AntichristIt 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.

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  • Hare takes on the critics

    You’d think an artist as established as Sir David Hare might, in the course of his long career, have learned to take a bit of criticism in his stride. However, amid a rather odd flare-up between the venerable British playwright/screenwriter and Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw, Hare comes off looking decidedly thin-skinned.

    The source of conflict is Bradshaw’s savage (though I think rather astute) review of the Hare-penned “The Reader.” Despite his admiration for the craftmanship on display and the performance of Kate Winslet, Bradshaw disliked the film intensely, objecting that it exploited the Holocaust to lend gravitas to “a middlebrow sentimental-erotic fantasy.” It’s a complex (and spoiler-ridden) piece that can’t easily be summarised, but Bradshaw’s closing paragraph offers the nub of his argument:

    I can’t forgive this film for being so shallow and so obtuse on such a subject, and I can’t accept it as a parable for war-guilt-by-association suffered by goodish Germans of the next generation. Under the gloss of high production value, under the sheen of hardback good taste, there is something naive and glib and meretricious. It left a very strange taste in my mouth.

    Bradshaw isn’t alone; you may remember that the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis had some similar qualms about the film’s take on Holocaust, accusing it of “embalm(ing) its horrors with artfully spilled tears.”

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  • “Agonized and beautiful”

    At the risk of sounding stoned on hope, I offer the following heresy: The movies are fine. Sometimes they’re great; occasionally they’re magnificent.

    The twelfth-graph opener in Manohla Dargis’s recent year-end wrap-up.  The sentiment would be a nice reference to Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York,” which Dargis calls “a grievously underloved film about life and death and every agonized and beautiful thing in between.”  Curiously, she’s the only critic in the New York Times triumverate who found a place for the film on her list.