Posted by Michael Hardiman on November 4, 2009, 16:36:38, in reply to "Re: Anti-Christ"
I read once that Von Trier thought that a film should be a stone in your shoe and Anti Christ has certainly proven to be a stone in mine. After watching it we drove home in silence and four days later I'm still trying to articulate what I think happened. I certainly bought into the theme of grief at the beginning of the film, I am the father of a young child so I was trying to empathise too much which probably didn't help me later on, and as the veil of grief came down and madness came to the fore I was caught off balance. Afterwards I came to the conclusion that maybe he was trying to say that there are some levels of guilt, real or percieved, that some people just can't handle and they are driven to extremes by their inability to live with that. The 'poor black soul' of the woman was in evidence in her mistreatment of the child and I thought that the crying baby she never found might have been a manifestation of her own guilt, as might her protestations that nature is evil assuming she didn't feel she was in control when she did treat her son badly. Maybe that is a Catholic interpretation. Funnily enough the uncut release is called The Protestant Version and the edited one The Catholic.
I enjoyed your comments about it, I'll read them to my wife later, she was as confused as I was. We don't get many good films in our local cinema and this stayed for a week and of the thirty or so people who went when we did some left before the end. They can rest assured that all is well with the world because Ashton Kutcher is on the way seducing yet another woman in her forties, now there is someone whose balls I'd like to slam with a big heavy piece of timber....
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