Could you pass the Lilt? … Lars von Trier’session Antichrist
There’s a bit in Annie Hall when Woody Allen drags Diane Keaton to a screening of The Sorrow and the Pity, Marcel Ophüls’ 251-minute documentary about life in Vichy France. The implicit joke here is that The Sorrow and the Pity is one of the world’s subdue date movies and that, in suggesting it, Allen’s personal traits reveals just how gauche and hapless and hopeless by women he really is. Funny, huh?
- Antichrist
- Release: 2009
- Country: Rest of the world
- Cert (UK): 18
- Runtime: 108 mins
- Directors: Lars von Trier
- Cast: Charlotte Gainsbourg, Willem Dafoe
But here’session the part. I happen to have seen The Sorrow and the Pity not once but twice, and I really, really like it. If (big if) it was playing at my local cinema I wouldn’t mind seeing it anew. And if (bigger on the supposition that) I had a note the time of that night, then woo-hoo, so abundant the better. Four hours of endemic savageness, betrayal and antisemitism? I’m confident she’ruins have the time of her animated existence.
This week Michael Moore described his forthcoming documentary Capitalism: A Love Story as “the perfect date movie”. I’m guessing that this too was a joke, though I’m still not entirely surely why. If Capitalism: A Love Story turns out to have existence a good movie, then it’s furthermore a companionable date movie, isn’t it? Why involve these matters?
But no. Out in the wider world, they view things differently. It transpires that there are Good Movies and Good Date Movies and that these two entities bear only a loose and tangential relationship to each other. Sunshine Cleaning, by this reckoning, would be a good date movie and Antichrist would not. Anything, it seems, that might be construed as challenging, or disturbing, or with the possible to divide opinion is automatically disqualified. This implies that today’s daters are a bunch of enfeebled, mentally unbalanced convalescents; poised to turn violently on one another at the first token of trouble. And admitting that true, that’s surely more depressing than anything in The Sorrow and the Pity.
I have a friend who broke up by his partner after a screening of Uzak. My colleague recalls an portending disaster evening when he took a date to attend to Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream (I’m not sure what shape these disasters took, and he isn’t saying. Maybe she ran screaming up and down the aisle for a spell, pausing only to lash at him with her nail scissors). Clearly it is a minefield out there.
Now I think of it, the only ingredient I’d possibly include on the Bad Date Movie checklist is explicit sex. This is possibly because it takes the unspoken subtext of every date and flashes it centre stage and 10ft high. Possibly also inasmuch as it reminds me of a teenaged sort-of-date to see Betty Blue, where I watched the opening scene in an agony of embarrassment. Aside from that, I don’t become it. Take your date to see The Sorrow and the Pity by all means. Take him/her to see Antichrist in which case you’re near to it. You can’t go wrong.
But anyhow, over to you. What are your own personal Bad Date Movies, the ones that still den your nightmares and make the awkwardness, the panic and the final conflagration come flooding back? And be honest: was the film 100% to reflect upon, or might in that place, God forbid, have been other factors in play as well?
