He said they discussed very little: "We had great intimacy on the set but the truth is we barely knew each other. In a recent interview, I asked Dafoe what discussions he had with Gainsbourg before their most difficult scenes. We don't know as much as we think we do about acting. The result, in a sense, is that He and She get away from von Trier's theoretical control and act on their own, as they are compelled to. The actors take the words and actions at face value and invest them with all the conviction they can. Who can say what von Trier intended? His own explanations have been vague. The ways they're called upon to act in this film are extraordinary. Both Dafoe and Gainsbourg have been risk takers, as anyone working with von Trier must be. Feature films may be fiction, but they are certainly documentaries showing actors in front of a camera. What was in it for me? More than anything else, I responded to the performances. That said, I know what's in it for von Trier. And why not? We are at least convinced we're watching a film precisely as he intended it, and not after a watering down by a fearful studio executive. He will do this with sex, pain, boredom, theology and bizarre stylistic experiments. They are extreme in a deliberate way von Trier, who has always been a provocateur, is driven to confront and shake his audience more than any other serious filmmaker - even Bunuel and Herzog. Will even a single audience member find these scenes erotic? That is hard to imagine. These passages have been referred to as "torture porn." Sadomasochistic they certainly are, but porn is entirely in the mind of the beholder.
They begin to inflict pain on each other in unspeakable and shockingly intimate ways. He and She don't much seek refuge in their cabin but increasingly find themselves outside in the wilderness. The woods are inhabited by strange animals that look ordinary - a deer, a fox, a crow - but are possessed and unnatural.
The psychic pain of his counseling and their removal to the forest are now joined by pain inflicted upon them by nature and each other. They have already eaten of the fruit, and it will never be Eden for them again. The cabin is named Eden make of that what you will. This leads to pain, most directly when he insists, at this of all times, on their going to their remote cabin in a dark woods that she fears at the best of times. Her grief is her fault, you see, and he will blame her for it. For reasons he may not be aware of, he is driven to deal with her guilt as a problem, lecturing her in calm, patient, detached psychobabble. Of course they blame themselves for having sex when they should have been attentive to the infant. Their error is in trying to treat it instead of accepting it and living it through. He is a controlling, dominant personality, who I believe is moved by the traumatic death to punish the woman who delivered his child into the world. She has been doing research on witchcraft, and it leads her to wonder if women are inherently evil. We must begin by assuming that He and She are already at psychological tipping points.
0 kommentar(er)
