DH at Cannes: Crossing cinematic limits

Cannes, DH News Service:

From the title itself to the maverick director’s claim that he is the ‘best’ film director in the world, everything about this high-profile film shook the festival up on Tuesday.

The pre-festival media screening on Monday night virtually left critics speechless, and the film elicited audible gasps from hardboiled journalists, thanks to its graphic scenes of genital mutilation and violence. Trier described the film as his “most important” one.
The film with its four major sections—Grief, Pain, Despair and Three Beggars—leave the viewers shaken and disturbed through its shocking treatment of the subject.

From misogyny to Biblical references, and from horror to the notion of how nature has been ‘cruel’ to women – in protest of which the female protagonist resorts to a graphically-shown genital mutilation, the film has so much to disturb the viewer that many could actually require the services of a psychotherapist after watching it.

Trier has explained in the notes on the making of the film that focuses on an unnamed couple (played by Hollywood star William Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) grieving over the death of their young son that it “does not contain a specific moral code and only has what some might call ‘the bare necessities’ in the way of a plot.”

‘Antichrist’ is more shocking than terrifying, and the viewers too will be either mesmerised by its audacious pushing of cinematic boundaries or repelled by its graphic content. And one can be quite sure that the film would never see the light of the day in India, going by the CBFC norms.

Trier said: “I am the best film director in the world, and all the others are overrated”, though he later downplayed it a little bit by saying that “all filmmakers think so about themselves but say it out, but I do”.