Antichrist provided the one bona-fide scandal of this year's festival. If Von Trier had come to cause a stir, he succeeded with bells on.

Legend has it that at least four viewers fainted dead away in their seats. Sitting in the dark of the Cannes Palais, the audience yelped and howled and covered their eyes. Oppressive Defoe winds up hobbled and impotent, while Gainsbourg runs clean off the rails and starts hacking at her own genitals with a pair of scissors. Bedevilled by guilt, his unnamed parents – He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) – retreat to a cabin in the woods called Eden. And yet nothing – but nothing – could prepare us for the film that followed.Īntichrist opens, simultaneously, with a blaze of unsimulated sex and the death (simulated, one hopes) of a child, who topples from an upstairs window and cannons into the snow below. This, after all, is the man who once dumped his festival prize in a dustbin, who dragged Nicole Kidman through the wringer in Dogville and provoked hoots of outrage when he won the Palme d'Or for his death row musical, Dancer In The Dark. Over the years the international press has grown accustomed to the antics of the puckish Dane. 'Antichrist.' At the Cannes film festival, where the film was unveiled in May, the audience responded with indulgent laughter. T he opening title arrives as a provocation, a mission statement.

Antichrist 2009 movie scene