Nymphomaniac: Volumes 1 and 2

2013 two-part epic

Rating: 16/20 (both parts)

Plot: Joe, the titular sexual dependent, recounts her sordid life to an old guy who enjoys reading.

Trollish Lars von Trier, the self-dubbed "best director in the world," is trying to raise the hairs on the backs of your necks, get your ire up more than getting anything else up, and there are times when that annoys me and times when it feels brilliant. He did it with a hilarious Nazi reference at a film festival, and he's doing it by showing us what it looks like when Shooby LeBoof has sexual intercourse. Part-poem, part-(over my head)-intellectualism, and part-pornography, Nymphomaniac probably does exactly everything that von Trier set out to do, and it does it in a succinct 4+ hours filled with relentless sexual imagery. As the two-part third part of a "Depression Trilogy," this is the one that seems most Trierish, possibly what he'd consider a magnum opus, but I'm not nearly smart enough to figure out how it ties in with either Antichrist or Melancholia. I'm assuming they're all personal statements of some kind, and with that in mind, I guess this one makes the most sense thematically of the three. There's a duality here with Gainsbourg's nymphomaniac and Skarsgard's asexual intellectual which just has to represent some kind of dueling polarities of an artist, right?

There are two narratives here that almost clash--Joe's mostly-chronological exploits and a story about how an old virgin is hearing about those exploits and interjecting by dropping knowledge about fly fishing, Bach, Edgar Allan Poe, the histories of the Eastern Church and Western Church, and mathematics. The former, as I said, is relentless and mostly humorless. Joe's story gradually grows darker and darker as she moves from her sexual awakenings and games on a train to consequences with her child, S&M, and criminal exploits. Joe's played by an impressive Stacy Martin when she's in her late teens to early 30's and by Charlotte Gainsbourg in most of volume 2's flashbacks or when she's talking to Skarsgard. The two actresses is an obvious choice because of the difference in age (Gainsbourg's got the type of face that can pass for 50 while there's no way you'd buy that about Martin no matter how much you Winona Ryderize her), but it works thematically, too. With Martin's Joe, there's a devious innocence, a fluffy apathy, and a childlike reckless abandon. With young Joe, there aren't really consequences even when Uma Thurman's character is all up in her grill trying to create consequences. With Gainsbourg's Joe, a little more guilt comes through. The laissez faire mentality is still there, but the character's lost a lot of the control (if not all of it) and the darkness in the Volume 2 chapters at least fooled me into thinking that there was regret and guilt. I don't know exactly what von Trier's trying to say about himself as an artist here and don't want to guess for fear of being completely wrong. And I just wrote that Volume 2 is darker than Volume 1, but I'm not sure that it is much darker. In the first, you've got a lot more about the relationship young Joe has with her father as they explore various trees, but the final moments with Christian Slater (only somewhat distracting as Joe's father) aren't exactly lighthearted. You've got the scene with Uma Thurman who is so angry here that she is almost unrecognizable. And you've got a scene that you'd have to describe as rape although since it ends with a shot of a young woman enjoying a bag of candy, its impact is lessened. In Volume 2, there's some blood, a gun, an argument between two well-endowed men, whippings. Maybe Volume 2 is just more superficially dark, and maybe you actually feel a little bit for the protagonist so that her moods affects the overall mood. Both parts have enough graphic sex to push this out of R-rated range, and you definitely don't want to watch it with your five-year-old child no matter how much of a Willem Dafoe fan she happens to be.

There are lots of shots of junk including a rather impressive penis montage, and there are all sorts of shots of simulated sex and actual penetration, but none of this--and I repeat, none of this--is the least bit arousing. The direction is too cold, detached, matter-of-fact, and the onslaught of sexual imagery is more likely to depress the viewer than turn anybody on. You wonder why von Trier went with sex here. My guess is that he thought he could get a bigger response than he would have been able to with violence or anything else that people generally respond to. I'd also guess that he's having a little fun with the hypocrisies of movie audiences. At one point, Skarsgard's character asks Joe, "Are you making fun of me?" I sort of wondered the same thing a few times as I watched this.

I do think there's a humor in this that a lot of people might be too distracted to recognize. I didn't laugh out loud at any point, but I did think a lot of this was very funny. I'd even describe it as a dark comedy. Just the idea of Skarsgard intellectualizing this sex addict's tell-all, pointing out those parallelisms to fly fishing or whatever, is funny, isn't it? The details of the masturbation jigsaw puzzle, the random and unlikely-to-be-true tidbit about how all the foreskins cut off in history would reach to Mars and back (right after the aforementioned penis montage), an episode in a restaurant involving a lot of spoons, and stock footage of quacking ducks after Skarsgard's "One hardly dare imagine the quacking duck" following Joe's description of the "silent duck" in a story. It feels like a little bit of slapstick in an otherwise dark story, one with an author who cynically philosophizes ("Love is just lust with jealousy added") and makes some of the most absurd intellectual connections while being just as much of a pretentious knob as he makes himself out to be with all his other work.

He might be a pretentious knob, but von Trier's films always look so good. This, like the other two movies in the trilogy, is filled with great imagery, and the music choices--also pretentious, except for a weird Rammstein song and maybe the Talking Heads track--often perfectly compliment the visuals. The acting is often very good, too. I still don't really know what to make of Charlotte Gainsbourg, but I really liked Stacy Martin. Especially her butt! I thought Shooby LeBoof was really good despite a sketchy accent, and Uma Thurman was electric during the short time she was on screen. And Skarsgard! Man, I could listen to that voice for hours. Just listen to the low rumble of his voice as he says "spontaneous orgasm" or feel his barely-contained excitement over "mathematical crap."

So what's this thing really about? There's a barely perceptible tension between Gainsbourg and Skarsgard as her story goes. She becomes frustrated with his digressions and even makes fun of one of them at one point ("That's your weakest digression yet.") while he appears to lose his objectivity and becomes almost agitated a couple times. And then, something happens at the end that almost seems like the punchline of a 4-hour joke. At that length, this seems a little indulgent, its pretensions might be unsettling, and a lot of what seems like loose ends are frustrating. But I really like how this one challenges, balls first (sometimes literally) and fearless. It's certainly not for everybody, but there's a reward for those willing to give it a chance. And that reward is not an erection unless statements about conflicting halves of an artistic soul get you going.

At least that's what I think this is about.