GRIEF, pain, despair and graphic genital mutilation – Lars von Trier serves up the lot in his tediously provocative new film Antichrist **, which receives its British premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival tonight.
A twisted spin on the Book of Genesis, revolving around an unnamed couple (Willem Defoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) trying to get over the death of their young son by taking refuge in a forest cabin they refer to as Eden, it's a film that seems custom-designed to appal thanks to its emotional brutality, its feminist-baiting musings on original sin and its horrific imagery. Yet it also seems like a glib joke on von Trier's part, as if he's daring us to engage with it on an intellectual level when really there's not much to engage with – at least, not much beyond wondering if it's worth getting worked up about how upsetting the final 20 minutes are.
Von Trier's reputation as a cinematic prankster certainly suggests that might be the case and, despite claiming he made Antichrist in a fit of depression, there are a couple of sly nods in the script to reinforce this idea. Mostly, though, these are buried beneath lots of pretentious ruminations on the nature of evil as our grieving protagonists work through their misery. This generally takes the form of Defoe's therapist constructing psychologically tortuous games to help his wife (Gainsbourg) get past the guilt she feels over the death of her son, who, in a striking slow-motion prologue sequence filmed in high-gloss black and white, takes a tumble out of a window while his parents make love.
Thenceforth, we're treated to many scenes of excruciating therapy-speak interspersed with graphic scenes of copulation, masturbation and shots of savagely mutilated animals, until finally it descends into some unbearably graphic scenes of physical violence that would almost play like an art-house parody of a torture porn horror flick were they not so hard to take. Indeed, at the risk of further inflating the hype that films such as this thrive on, it will leave you with images in your head you would probably rather not have. Unfortunately, there's very little intellectual nourishment to compensate.
In a much less extreme way, David Mackenzie's debut American film,
Spread **, similarly deploys provocative techniques to mask its inadequacies, which in this case means using explicit sex to hide how bland and conventional it is. A sex comedy with plenty of sex, not enough comedy, and nowhere near enough smarts to pull off its attempts at Midnight Cowboy-style pathos, it stars Ashton Kutcher as Nikki, an LA-based hustler who has become an expert in getting by on his looks, ingratiating himself into the lives of rich older women to get access to good clothes, good food and luxurious living (insert your own Demi Moore joke here).
His latest mark is Anne Heche's hotshot lawyer. She's savvy enough to know she's being used, but tolerates Nikki until, against his better judgment, he allows his attentions to be diverted by another young hustler (Margarita Levieva), who appears to be scamming her way through life in similar fashion – until, that is, nonsensical plot developments saddle her with extra emotional baggage for no other reason than to complicate Nikki's life and initiate his inevitable journey from a vacuous, pretty boy man-whore to a slightly less vacuous pretty boy whose looks no longer work for him.
Unfortunately, Kutcher can't quite pull off this minute transformation, so Nikki actually becomes even less interesting as the film progresses. That's too bad, because Spread is not without promise. Unlike Mackenzie's British work (especially Young Adam and Hallam Foe), it smacks of compromise, with potentially fascinating ideas about the market value of sex (early on Nikki talks about "building equity" with new partners) quickly falling by the wayside.
Coincidentally, those ideas are actually at the heart of Steven Soderbergh's
The Girlfriend Experience ***, which focuses on a high-class escort (adult film star Sasha Grey) trying to diversify her assets as the world faces an economic meltdown. Quickly shot last October, the film's rapid turn-around gives it a "capturing-the-moment" immediacy that transforms it into an incisive comment on how little difference there now exists between prostitution and the ruthlessly capitalist ideals adhered to by Manhattan's money-obsessed power élite and other upwardly mobile wannabes on the make.
Though Bret Easton Ellis has been writing about this kind of stuff for years (and both The Girlfriend Experience and Spread owe a significant debt to the designer label-obsessed observations found in American Psycho), Soderbergh breaths some fresh life into it with a coolly intellectual approach that steers proceedings clear of the story's salacious potential.
There's yet more sex in
Humpday ***, a low-budget US indie film that takes the current vogue for bromance films to its logical next step by building a film around a pair of straight best friends (Joshua Leonard and Mark Duplas) in different stages of their lives who, for various artistic and personal reasons, decide to make a gay porn film, which they plan to enter into the titular amateur adult film festival.
Though often very funny, writer/director Lynn Shelton's film lacks the insight into the awkwardness of male friendship found in the recent I Love You, Man, and, despite her provocative set-up, it frequently backs off from doing anything particularly edgy with it.
• To find all of Alistair Harkness's Edinburgh International Film Festival reviews, visit
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