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Lars von Trier lashes out again with Nymphomaniac — all four hours of it.
4/4
S
mug moralizing, leaden irony, Old Testament punishments — yup, it’s Lars von Trier. Oh, and cocks. So many cocks. And vaginas. And whip-welted asses. And grim fucking. And solemn pronouncements about fucking. What else could this be but Nymphomaniac, the Danish writer-director’s visually brilliant, intellectually infuriating four-hour sexual Scheherazade? Well, nothing. Unless you count all the other formally thrilling but terminally dunderheaded Lars von Trier movies in which women are humiliated or beaten or violated. Which is … let’s see … all of them? That’s unfair and a little sweeping, but so is Trier. In his parochial cosmology, hellish evil lurks in every heart, with men in particular exhaling the stuff in atoms almost visible in the chilly European daylight. The kinder or simpler or more respectable-seeming the gentleman, the more likely he is to rape you. And to explain to you why, on this Godforsaken plane, you had it coming. It’s explanation, not sex, that drives Nymphomaniac, a mosaic of international genitalia arranged in varying states of penetration. The movie’s numbered, titled chapters are related in flashback as bruised Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) tells virginal Seligman (Stellan Skarsgard) her life story — or, anyway, her vast sexual history. Seligman has found Joe halfconscious in an alley outside his cheerless flat, the victim of an attack. He brings her indoors and brews her some tea and coaxes her gently (uh oh) into conversation. He doesn’t judge her increasingly sordid confessions but instead filters them through dull, bookish metaphors — a conceit that, for the film’s first half, yields a few dry laughs. (Skarsgard is very, very good.) Just how Joe came to be assaulted on Seligman’s threshold is saved until almost the end. By that time, her tale’s manifold coincidences
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Gainsbourg, playing the afflicted. and absurdities (mainly her repeated intersections with a man called Jerôme, played mostly by a boy called Shia LaBeouf) have ceased to amuse or even much provoke. The second half of the story (Volume II) recapitulates key Trier memes, including a toddler endangered by a sex-distracted parent (last used to kick off Antichrist), and all of the director’s meta gesturing feels onanistic (ha?), if not just lazy. After a long run (“I discovered my cunt as a 2-year-old,” Joe says as she undertakes her autobiography), Joe’s vagina stops bringing her pleasure long about the third hour, and things get a little slow for everybody else, too. Even Seligman, who spends the first volume expounding on fly fishing (if only Izaak Walton could get royalties from this repurposing of his The Compleat Angler) and Bach and Fibonacci numbers, like Umberto Eco on a first date, starts to clam up. It’s probably better to plow through Nymphomaniac in one sitting, even as it darkens through a second half that gets away from the director and his cast. (It never gets away from Manuel Alberto Claro, whose often arresting cinematography on both parts almost betters his work on Trier’s previous movie — and his best — Melancholia.) The vignettes that make up Joe’s selective version of events hinge on a couple of recurring presences (besides Jerôme, there’s her father, played by a suddenly acceptable Christian Slater) but work best when she encounters someone who refuses to be part of the story. When a never-better Uma Thurman shows up, as a wronged wife using her three young sons as props, you almost wish that Nymphomaniac had been an HBO series. Then again, you could skip the whole thing.
qUoTe-A s O Ig m A E e R h T 4/5 4/10
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