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The author asserts that he isn't qualified enough to opine on Antichrist in the tradition of modern film writing which means that he's going to try, as much as possible, to stay away from boring and pedantic references to shots, hand held zooms, camera angles, story, characters and the overall disgusting aesthetic, moral or sexual appeal of the film.

Dear Reader,

I am very excited. I watched Antichrist last night and loved it. It's a shock that I got in time.

Wow. Whoa.

Three people came to my mind after I watched the film.

The first was Gandhi. The guilt of a woman who watches her baby fall out of a window as she is in the throes of a vibrant and rocky orgasm reminded me of the father of the nation and his own guilt trip of fornicating with his wife while his ailing father was taking his final breaths in an adjoining room. I wondered why Bapu never contemplated on the quality or degrees of the human orgasm when he was contemplating on truth.

The second person I thought of was David Foster Wallace, a depressed soul (like the director of Antichrist) and a writer brilliant enough to harass his audience to the point of absolute submission. Or disgust. It all depends on who you are and where you stand.

Wallace would be the best person in my opinion who can explain everything that happens in the film scene by scene in a vocabulary that refuses to surprise and forever arouses suspicions that it has been stolen, outright from the shelf, from a one-room office of a struggling middle class New York therapist.

The trouble is David Foster Wallace is no longer alive. He killed himself last year.

The third person I thought of is the director of the film who I will not name because when the thought came to me there was no name to the director. Plus I have never heard of him until recently and have never even accidentally watched any of his films. I had no prior knowledge that the gentleman who directed Antichrist is well known in the arty western cinema world as a provocative imp with the sensationalist gene and some great work behind him.

Perhaps this doesn't explain it well. Let's try an allegory.

Imagine the bitch-eating-dog-eating-bitch art scene of New York or London. Dream up an opening night after-party at a high-ceiling apartment in Manhattan.

The air is warm with artistic incest. Black shines the way it's supposed to in art circles. The gathering, a social collective intent on pleasure while they do business, is about to achieve the sociological equivalent of the human orgasm. Wine flows. Despite global warming, Al Gore, lies, counter-lies and the games that people play but should not be playing, guests are reminded by their drunken selves that art will save us. We shall overcome. Yes we shall. Hum Honge Kamyaab, ek din.

In this crowd the director of Antichrist is like the artist who walks in, goes to the kitchen, urinates in the sink in full attendance and leaves. Just to make a point: sink disposes waste.

Sounds like Damien Hirst?

You're taking the provocative imp with a sensationalist gene bit a tad too seriously. The director of the film isn't like Damien Hirst. He's who he says he is: a depressed man.

I am completely disgusted with what I have just seen. Extreme cruelty. A man's manhood is severed; a rod with a heavy weight is thrust in his leg; he tries to escape but his aggressor follows him to the dark deep woods of the Eden.

Finally, with great effort and pain, the man is able to hide himself suitably in a cave like structure at the base of a giant tree. The man is safe. He is now curious. He lights a match which wakes a bird nestled deeper in the cave. The bird begins howling (or whatever it is that birds do). We don't want her to. The noise alerts the man's aggressor, his wife. The man takes a stone and beats the skull of the bird to a pulp. I am glad. This cruelty doesn't disgust me.

I simply had to watch the film!

Everywhere I go people are talking about it. It's rare for a foreign film to generate such buzz in such a short time with the severe handicap of illegal distribution. Antichrist opened in NewYork only last Friday but it's selling like hot cakes outside the Andheri station.

Those who can't get the pirated DVDs are borrowing. I wanted to watch the film; it reminded me of the video library days. I asked a colleague who had a copy but it turned out he'd given to someone else already. Such is the craze.

Another colleague has tuned his torrent stream and must have completed his illegal download of the Blue Ray DVD print by the time you're reading this.

A Senior Editor has read enough about the film. She doesn't want to go through the ordeal of watching something that has been labeled 'disgusting in parts' unanimously by the far left, the far right and centre of the global film industry political set up.

The New York Times laughed it off as an immature attempt by someone who could do well with lessons in Philosophy and contemporary thought. Just the way they treated Gandhi when he first came on the political scene half naked. Except Gandhi was never so loud. Yet Antichrist isn't an exploration into anything that's deep which is why I think it's profound; without the burden of cleverness, subtlety or a decent story.

For me Antichrist is about the struggle between unreason and reason. Not between good and evil or man and woman. To me, the woman represents unreason (only in the context of the film) whose grief must be made reasonable (reason being the man and lest you forget his symbolic role he's a therapist as well).

The violent struggle between grief and the structure that demands grief articulate itself else be relegated to insanity. The weapons deployed in the struggle make the story a modern epic. Sex. Psychiatric nouns.

The he and the she throw Freudian and Pagan symbolism at each other. I won't get into the entire story because I still work in a family newspaper read by family people like you, dear reader.

But, just to give you an idea let's say a couple is having sex. It's beautiful and intense. In another room a child is playing in a crib looking pleased. Outside the open window a gentle breeze blows in a snowy landscape.

As the couple's lovemaking gathers momentum we see that in the other room the curiosity of the child takes him out of the crib, slowly, one step at a time, and fatefully towards the open window. As the mother is having an orgasm the child falls down the window. She is broken. Baas.

That's all I am going say about the plot. If you're really keen go buy a pirated DVD outside any railway station.

I have deep sympathy for the woman in the film that goes beyond my Portnoy-sis.

Anyone who's been to a therapist knows what I am talking about (the others can try but I won't blame them if they hate me for boring them). The fear. The anxiety. The shame of not being able to say what is one scared of.

The traumatic onset of self-consciousness triggered by a search for the right nouns and verbs to articulate one's pain else confront the risk of it being obliterated from the reality that is consumed jointly by the client - that is you and the therapist or facilitator - that is the formidable other.

The insistence on thinking when all one would like to do would just be. The sudden warming up of the ears with the sensation that one may actually be mad. Madness -- that one colour of the rainbow that's a complete rainbow in itself. Yet, for all the hues it may have and the aspects it may cherish it can never come close to grief in the periodic table of human emotions simply because it's guilty of confusing pleasure with pain and pain with pleasure.

It's unreasonable. And that is enough for it to be asked to leave the class.

Perhaps that is another reason why the husband, referred to in the film, as 'he' is a mental health professional. He's a therapist. What's more he hates the pills. He's the talking type. The kind of man who can talk you out of anything on your own initiative but absolutely against your will.

To me the film stands out as a brilliant depiction of the unnamed; shot like an episodic nightmare that goes on for two hour. Psychiatric help with its armoury of loaded language, with its verbs and nouns, is made to stand naked and paraded in a jungle. And that's about it.

This story of a man and a woman dealing with the death of their child is a joke on us.

Please watch Antichrist and let me know what you think.

(Certain visuals in the film may disturb children and under 18 audience. Caution is advised.)

Rave on!

Sincerely

Mayank