Nymphomaniac

MOVIE #1,150 •🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿• 09.14.23 RANKING LARS VON TRIER: #3 By way of its shear gargantuan size (almost 5 ½ hours), and its position as the final entry of his most polarizing era (the Depression trilogy), Nymphomaniac seems to be screaming for — if not only striving to achieve — magnum opus status in the Lars von Trier filmography. The inclusion of hardcore porn is all many (probably too many) are gonna remember about this, but not me. I’ll remember all the asinine and overly complicated metaphors intertwined throughout, and Christian Slater’s atrocious attempt at an English accent. Just kidding. I’ll remember the sex stuff.

It’s ugly and sick and I’m sure ‘problematic’ and so on, and yet it ranks among von Trier’s very best because all of those things are part of the human experience, and he hasn’t just made a film about them here: he’s made a film that literally and physically invokes them in the viewer. The difference between a piece of art like this and some scrap of torture porn (or regular porn!) is that, in spite of the vileness of these characters and the full-view, unfiltered look into their actions, it’s rendered beautifully and thoughtfully (the latter almost to a fault, with the plentiful and sometimes lengthy off-kilter digressions into metaphor, though I appreciated those too).

It feels like the spiritual successor, in a way, to 1996’s Breaking the Waves. Where, for better or worse, that film remained tied down to a traditional narrative structure, the setup here (especially with its conversational framing device and use of found footage) is allowed to burst free. Where Emily Watson’s Bess became a nymphomaniac out of duty and real human love, Charlotte Gainsbourg’s Joe became one out of compulsion and a personified inner rage. It’s fitting that Stellan Skarsgård played the central counterpart in each movie, too: the injured, impotent husband in Waves and the asexual intellectual foil here, Seligman. They would make a lovely double feature if you have half a day to kill.

Also, on that point, its length is a crucial if not necessary asset in terms of its success. Where the grotesque elements of Antichrist felt like cheap genre riffs unloaded in its final act, the audience is inundated from the get-go here with a variety of “hard to watch” scenes and sequences of all stripes and duration. And they come steadily for FIVE hours. It’s an endurance test, perhaps, but a rewarding one — particularly in the middle stretch of Vol. II.

It’s also the rare movie where you don’t need to relate to, sympathize with, or even totally understand the motives of the protagonist. The film is set up with a question: is Joe good or bad? This query is batted back and forth ad nauseam in Vol. I but it slowly dissipates over the course of the second part. In the end, it’s more about humanity at large and Joe is just an avatar for our evil urges.

And Seligman’s heel turn in the end is the ultimate von Trierian joke. Of course he was just listening to get into her pants. What is a woman like Joe without the thousands (millions, billions) of men? There are, naturally, touchy concepts about gender swirling all around here and, in the beginning, it felt like this was subtly leaning into the misogynist territory of Antichrist (I don’t necessarily see that film as stridently anti-women but that sentiment is definitely out there). The wonderful thing about Nymphomaniac is that, by its conclusion, we do register some sympathy for Joe, if not even viewing her as miraculously heroic. And because of its structure, constantly presenting both sides of every moment and idea, and playing devil’s advocate, via the Monday Morning Quarterbacking session with Joe and Seligman, we’re allowed an even further detachment from moral judgment. It’s like LVT is hedging his bets while also staying ahead of the curve. It’s pretty brilliant. I don’t think this is von Trier’s best movie but in a career full of audacious maneuvers and good taste/faith boundary pushing, it’s by far his most daring and provocative. And that’s saying something.

ranking lars von trier cont'd
#4 ↩ • ↪ #2

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⫷ MOVIE #1,149 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,151 ⫸

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Nymphomaniac (stylised as NYMPH()MANIAC onscreen and in advertising) is a 2013 erotic art film written and directed by Lars von Trier. The film stars Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgård, Stacy Martin, Shia LaBeouf, Christian Slater, Jamie Bell, Uma Thurman, Jean-Marc Barr, Willem Dafoe, Connie Nielsen, and Mia Goth in her debut. Separated as two-part films, the plot follows Joe (played by Gainsbourg and Martin), a self-diagnosed "nymphomaniac," who recounts her erotic experiences to a bachelor who helps her recover from an assault. The narrative chronicles Joe's promiscuous life from adolescence to adulthood and is split into eight chapters told across two volumes. The film was originally supposed to be only one complete entry, but, because of its length, von Trier made the decision to split the project into two separate films. Nymphomaniac was an international co-production of Denmark, Belgium, France, and Germany. It was released on December 25, 2013.