By Alex Rake (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: November 19, 2014
Writer and Director Lars von Trier’s two-volume Nymphomaniac will leave you hot and bothered — but mostly bothered, as any valuable film should.
The plot concerns the nymphomaniac Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) telling her life’s story to the man who helps her after finding her beaten and lying on the ground. The man, named Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård), illuminates certain aspects of her stories by comparing them to what he has read in literature. The film tells Joe’s stories visually, featuring Stacy Martin as a younger Joe and Shia LaBeouf as her many-time lover, Jerôme.
The stimulating combination of Joe’s sexual odyssey and Seligman’s strange digressions make the total four hours of the two volumes pass like an hour and a half. The previous films in von Trier’s “Depression Trilogy,” Antichrist (2009) and Melancholia (2011), never managed to hold my attention as keenly as this one.
[pullquote]Gainsbourg makes it easy to understand the paradoxically oppressive and liberating power of Joe’s nymphomania.[/pullquote]
The acting engages as much as the storytelling. Gainsbourg and Skarsgård have wonderful chemistry, and they never act more or less comfortable around each other than would make sense for acquaintances in their evolving conversation. As well, Gainsbourg makes it easy to understand the paradoxically oppressive and liberating power of Joe’s nymphomania by letting her conflicting pains and desires show on her face and rattle in her voice, never letting it devolve into melodrama. Even Shia LaBeouf, with his weirdly feigned English accent, helps you forget that you are watching Shia LaBeouf. Most important of all, every actor succeeds at having believable sex.
One of the aspects of the film that may be unwelcome is the apparent realness of everything that happens on the screen. The genitalia are real! The intercourse is real! Although the actors had body doubles that performed the sex, this is difficult to notice and you really get the sense that you are watching Charlotte Gainsbourg get fisted, for instance. However, the sex in the film doesn’t function like pornography, nor does it work as shock value. Though it is indeed both erotic and unsettling, it’s neither glorified nor made ugly; no matter how kinky it gets, it is simply shown as it is, albeit framed in interesting ways.
The kinkier Joe becomes and the more Seligman reveals about his character, the less the sex seems important. It becomes why the sex happens and what the sex leads to that really holds the attention. In other words, the characters’ actions become less important than the characters’ psychological journeys. By making sex the focus of his two-volume film, von Trier counters sex’s usual power to distract from serious thought. This is especially disorienting to a culture that simultaneously mystifies, condemns, and celebrates sex, but disorientation like this provides a good opportunity for self-reflection that can be hard to find in movies.
A five-and-a-half-hour director’s cut of the film was released on September 10. Whichever version of this unsettling, thought-provoking movie you see, be warned that it is probably not something you want to watch with your mother.
