You either fancy watching these things or you don't. We've had Catherine Breillat films using gardening implements and real porn stars we've seen real orgies (Von Trier's own film, Idiots, more than a decade ago) fellatio in a comedy musical (Shortbus) and in The Brown Bunny and even that nice Michael Winterbottom showed penetrative sex in 9 Songs
So, while Antichrist shocked in Cannes, these things aren't a problem for the seen-it-all public anymore. These were famous Cannes shocks in the past, yes, but they feel intrinsic to the plot. It's not like the moment in Nagisa Oshima's In The Realm of the Senses, when the prostitute cuts off her lover's penis, or when, in Marco Ferreri's The Last Woman, Gérard Depardieu takes a Moulinex carving knife to his member. And neither is this clitoral self-mutilation. Actresses in the 1980s used to say they didn't mind taking their clothes off if the nudity was necessary to the plot, which it seldom was. It's beautifully filmed nonsense, I grant you, shot by Anthony Dod Mantle, fresh from his Oscar-winning cinematography on Slumdog Millionaire, but it is utterly pompous, stilted and boring.Īntichrist's problem is that it doesn't earn its big shock moment. Shock is the only possible attraction because the rest of the film is nonsense. If I were to urge you not to see it, these days that might encourage people to rush for tickets. Now the whole world knows about it, the moment has surely gone.Īntichrist isn't really a film. Von Trier created the most shocking moment in film history and we all talked about it and saw it and were suitably disgusted. In Cannes, I thought there was something Situationist about it. It is ghoulish and nasty, an experience to endure rather than enjoy. By their nature, shocks are unexpected, so if you go along expecting Gainsbourg's big close-up, it can hardly come as a shock, can it? However, the paradox remains that the main reason you'll go to see this film is for the shock.Īntichrist is a freak show, a Victorian crowd puller. Indeed, by the time you see Antichrist, the film might have lost its power to shock. The thing is, shocks don't happen very much in cinema anymore. And just as crash victims remember the sound of an impact, I can recall the silence when the Lumière theatre in Cannes' Palais des Festivals was, for a second or two, shocked. I can still hear and see the moment, as if burned forever on my eyelids. Specifically - and those of a gentle disposition should look away now - we see Charlotte Gainsbourg take a pair of rusty scissors to her clitoris and, in anatomical close-up, snip it off.
The scene in question features female genital mutilation. His film Antichrist is now heading your way, but after causing a stir on the Croisette, where shocks have become commonplace over the years, can it have the same effect on less scrutinised screens? Danish director Lars von Trier can lay serious claim to having created the single most revolting shot in the history of Cannes.
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