“Let me just make sure I’m in the center of the frame,” says Lars von Trier, pixilated and awash in computer-screen blue, while he fidgets with the placement and angle of his webcam. Seated at a desk in his home office in Copenhagen, the 53-year-old filmmaker appears amused as his eyes ping-pong between his own cyber-reflection and the one broadcast onto his screen from across the Atlantic Ocean. Laughing, he says, “You look like Michael Jackson!”
Misanthrope. Misogynist. Pornographer. Xenophobe. Enfant terrible. Child. Von Trier, the scrappy pioneer of experimental classics such as Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark and Dogville, has sustained ruthless and barbarous critical lashings throughout his troubled and troubling career. With the release of his thirteenth feature film, Antichrist, another attack seems inevitable.
The film stars actress-musician Charlotte Gainsbourg, the daughter of Jane Birkin and the late Serge Gainsbourg, as a grieving mother who retreats to her isolated country home in Eden with her therapist husband (played by Willem Dafoe) after the death of their young child. Despite their attempts to fight pain with cognitive therapy, Eden quickly turns hellish when Gainsbourg excises her clitoris with a pair of dull scissors and impales Dafoe’s penis before stimulating him to bloody climax. But despite the film’s shocking violence, the director, notorious for teasing journalists, insists, “I groan when I read, in almost every story written about me, that I’m a provocateur.”
The film, which premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival to applause and outrage, is just one of many von Trier creations to polarize audiences. When Manderlay was released in 2005, it was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, but it was also panned by critics who found the film to be “blindingly boring,” “ham-fisted” and “embittered.” When one journalist asked von Trier to defend his portrayal of slavery 70 years after the American Civil War, the director responded, “We will never see a black president, yet they are all over TV… so what good does that do? It only sounds politically correct, but it’s not a reality.” Reminded of this statement today, his smirk expands into a wide smile. “Well, my perspective on that has changed a bit,” he says before a long pause. “President Obama seems very authentic… I wonder if there’s a white man inside of him.”
Not surprisingly, given its subject matter, critics have beenequally divided by Antichrist. To some, it’s yet another example of von Trier’s sadistic irreverence; to others, it’s a beautifully shot, surprising mixed-genre journey into love, lust and grief that rightfully earned Gainsbourg, a two-time César Award winner who recently recorded her third studio album with Beck, the Best Actress honor at the festival.
Without question, Gainsbourg’s performance is striking. Von Trier has been known to inflict considerable emotional and physical pain on the actresses who star in his films, and Antichrist is not likely to convince anyone otherwise. Under his direction, Nicole Kidman was harnessed to a neck-chain and forced to drag a heavy flywheel for much of Dogville; Björk, who starred in 2000’s Dancer in the Dark, came to set each day screaming, “I despise you, Mr. Trier,” and, allegedly, ate her own cardigan out of wild frustration.
“I must enjoy the suffering,” says Gainsbourg, a sensation that was only intensified by the fact that she arrived on set shortly after having undergone brain surgery to treat a cerebral hemorrhage, the result of a minor water-skiing accident. Playing a character struggling with mortality was, at times, torturous. “Death is a new fear for me,” says the 38-year-old mother of two. “Before I had children, I didn’t really care that much. I wasn’t preoccupied with death until I had that accident, and now I’ve started to be quite fearful. I don’t really like that new aspect of myself.”
Meanwhile, von Trier, who has battled depression his entire life, was so weak and despondent during production that he couldn’t always hold his camera. “At the very start, he told me, ‘I’m not sure I’ll be able to continue,’” says Gainsbourg. “‘You’ll have to forgive me if I quit at some point.’” Although he completed the project, von Trier has yet to come through the darkness. “You wouldn’t know it by looking at me,” he says, “but I’m still deeply entrenched in depression.” Gainsbourg echoes the sentiment: “I have a streak of masochism in me,” she says laughing. “It’s gone for a while, but this film didn’t cure me.”
But if von Trier and Gainsbourg brought baggage to the filming of Antichrist, at least some of it matched. Von Trier was raised in a family that valued logic over emotion. As a young boy, he asked his mother if he might die in his sleep; he was told that, indeed, it was possible. In 1995, while on her deathbed, his mother revealed to him that his father was not the man who raised him, a disclosure that inspired, in part, his Dogme 95 manifesto—von Trier’s credo that demands directors use real locations, natural lighting and non-simulated sex as a rallying cry against artifice. Similarly, Gainsbourg’s relationship with her father was cut short by his death when she was only 20. They shared a close bond, which was exploited by the international media after the release of “Lemon Incest,” a duet they recorded when she was 13 years old. “In an interview, Lars said he thought he reminded me of my father,” says Gainsbourg, “and now, of course, I could make that link. He’s very sincere with his questions and fears. He’s a real artist in that way. He never censors himself.”
Despite their strong connection, which Gainsbourg describes as “beyond words,” theirs was a sometimes-strained rapport. “It was a weird relationship,” says Gainsbourg. “The moments when it was just the two of us were pretty awkward.” Still, the affinity she felt for von Trier compelled her to test all limits in the middle of an isolated German forest. “I had the feeling that he was inside me,” she says. “He understood every blink, every detail. I felt as if I were portraying him, even though we were dealing with female sexuality. The anxiety and fear in my character was pretty much him.”