Nymph( )maniac Vol. I and II – Lars Von Trier – The film begins in
darkness, a black screen…sounds of water dripping, a street, general banal ambiance…but, this being Von Trier’s new film, attached with its own inevitable
carnival of publicity, what the blank screen radiates most is anticipation. Volume II ends with a
blank screen, the sounds we here are no longer teasingly prolonging any
anticipation but instead darkly confirming a sense of dread. The two visually blank endings, like two bookends of
concealment either side of Von Trier’s indulgence of exposure (of sex, but more
convincingly naked: of himself) roughly equate to the two presiding emotions of
each Volume: pleasure and pain.
Found beaten and collapsed in an
alleyway, Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is discovered by Seligman (Skarsgard),
after refusing his offer to call her an ambulance he instead takes her to his
apartment. In the bare and mouldy confines of Seligman’s apartment, Joe begins
to recount her story. It is this episodic and chaptered recollection that
frames the narrative, balanced between her Scheherazade act and Seligman’s
intellectual digressions, the sexual odyssey of her life is revealed. From the
polymorphic perversions of Joe as a Freudian child, a cultish denial of love
and her teenage conquests of competitive fucking - through to a later lonely
fluctuation between death and sex. Meanwhile Seligman, a bookish and self-confessed
virgin, patiently transposes each of her Sadean capers into obscure and philosophical analogies. His intellectual diversions comically wander from fly-fishing, knot
making, Bach’s polyphony, Roman history and the Fibonacci sequence to a
hilariously mythologized history of the cake fork. In these episodes, at play
in more prominence in Vol I, Von Trier flexes a surprisingly adept venture into
warped and imaginative comedy. The interactions between Charlotte Gainsbourg
and Skarsgard, which at first seem stunted and stagey, become a source of
well-written and almost (for Von Trier) sensitive human dialogue. Of course
this element of human character never goes any further than being an echo
chamber of Von Trier, his own inner dialogue counselled into a tongue in cheek
back and forth.
Volume I begins
its reveal of Joe in the alleyway with the same poetic cinematography that
illuminated dream-like visions in Meloncholia
and, amid many sequences, the falling acorns of Antichrist. Also, in the slow pan across roof tiles dripping rain,
the opening clearly reverberates with Tarkovsky’s Mirror…reminding us straight away of the same laughable audacity
that led him to dedicate Antichrist
to the Russian filmmaker. There are also extending musings on trees that, again
with predictable clumsiness, seem to play with elements of Tarkovsky.
Referencing however is also extended to Von Trier’s other consistent companion
of idolatry: himself. Music familiar from Antichrist
sweeps in as we witness Joe's child drawn to the window – the same
tragedy that began Antichrist’s
descent into madness and all round snippings of suffering.
Volume I is an
unpredictably comic beast, in a way that seems to suggest a new and
enjoyable direction for Von Trier. The actress playing a young Joe (Stacy
Martin) proves to be an impressively commanding presence, managing to seem both
blankly remote and believably, dangerously curious. Her unrelenting sexual
juggling of partners and possibilities conjures the transgressive
figure of the ‘child-woman’ so troublingly central to surrealist fantasies.
From Sade’s Justine and Juliette through to the adoption of Lewis Carroll’s
Alice and Bataille’s Simone (in Story of
the Eye), the character of Joe is safely steeped in literary contexts. I
say ‘safely’ as this familiar trajectory and exploration of sexual nature does
feel, frequently, a recycled buffet of Von Trier’s bedside browsing; it is
perhaps this recognisably intellectualised content which prevents the film from
ever becoming as provocative as it - and the advertising campaign – attempts to
be. We even have one moment in which a frontal shot of a vagina is immediately
followed by an opening eye: like his affection for Tarkovsky, nothing in the
film’s discussion of sex escapes Von Trier’s patented aversion to
subtlety.
Stand out moments in the first
Volume include: Uma Thurman’s terrifically pitched, high-octane performance as
an outraged mother (it would stand alone as a jaw dropping and blackly comic
sketch); Stacy Martin’s confident and powerful portrayal of young Joe; the
cake-fork digression; Udo Kier in an all too brief cameo; the
re-interpretation of ‘spooning’; and the triptych screen split that accompanies an
analogy drawn between organ music and three separate lovers. Low points include, most
notably: Shia LaBeouf’s pan global accent. He somehow manages to skip between
South African, cockney and Australian in just a handful of syllables.
Distracting but, and I think I’m alone in this, I found it oddly endearing.
When a brown paper bag over the head constitutes an artistic statement, who was
really expecting nuance??
Volume II is a
far more troubling affair. Naturally the film darkens. We move from Volume I's sexual discovery and Joe’s insatiable sexual appetite to her sudden
loss of feeling. Volume I ends with her no longer able to experience
sexual pleasure, what then follows is a spiralling series of attempts to regain
‘feeling’. It is a vaginal numbness that seems to parallel Von Trier’s own
depressive insularity: apparently, along with Meloncholia and Antichrist
this finishes the ‘Depression’ trilogy. Lars Von Trier keeps returning to the
trilogy, in his existing filmography he has already completed the Europe,
Golden Mind and American trilogies. However, depending on your cynicism, this is surely just
a neat way of legitimizing obsessions. The structure of the trilogy
accommodates for thematic repetition.
Certainly, in this light, Nymph()maniac returns to and re-articulates
over familiar Trierisms: chief among them being maternal guilt; sex as
destructive; notions of female entrapment and liberation; a dubiously skulking
question of misogyny; and a generally misanthropic disillusion. This is why,
although wildly ranging and eclectic, the first half's comedy seemed an intriguing
change. Unfortunately the second half becomes dragged down into an over
fraught, over familiar and over long pic‘n mix of Von Trier specialties. The
film’s ending, both infuriating and perfect, seems the most suitable cinematic
signature to encapsulate Von Trier’s devout lack of cheer. There are no good
Samaritans in this world, every human is ‘designed to kill,’ feeling hurts and
sex is a prison. All of which at least testifies the entitlement, ‘Depression
Trilogy’, as a fairly good choice.
We witness Joe
become employed by Willem Defoe, a debt collector of criminal extremes, in a
line of business that she can supposedly use her experiences of nymphomania (proudly distinguished
from the banality of ‘sex addiction’). Essentially, having slept with so many
men, the premise is that Joe has become attuned to gauging men’s sexual weaknesses,
fears or fantasies…all of which can be used to blackmail Defoe’s clients. This advancement in the plot feels underdeveloped, unrealistic and strangely dull. The
concept that Joe, configured as some kind of cock whisperer, can amble into any
residence and successfully interrogate these clients just seems a
bit…tangential from the film’s, already packed, trajectory. Essentially it
allows for the introduction of another, younger female character for her to
groom into the business; thus allowing a queasy distortion of her, already
disturbed, maternal experiences. This is where the film begins to feel over
cluttered, becoming more and more like an out of control Greek tragedy…but
without the timeless structure. Instead it inaugurates a tonally undecided
descent into a weirdly unfeeling melodrama.
However,
there is one arresting moment that results from the unexpected debt collecting
episode. Joe manages to unveil a paedophile by regaling him with an eroticised
encounter with a child; the man is stripped from the waist down and tied to a
chair. As she narrates this we watch, to his horror, the steady rise of his
erection. Following the exposure of his hidden secret, Joe then gets on her
knees and fellates the man. At this point Seligman interrupts her story with a baffled
‘You did what??’ To which Joe calmly responds that this was a man who has kept his
desire repressed, a man who’s sexuality is forbidden, who’s urges have never
been acted upon… a prisoner to his sexuality, and subsequently a fate which Joe all
too painfully understands. Realising him to be a victim of his own desire her
act is reasoned as an apology: for ruining his life, when his sexuality (which,
as her story attests, is an inescapable force of life) had already been stifled
with such strength and secret discipline. It is an uncomfortable and
provocative sentiment, one that more pointedly seems to engage with
contemporary taboo. This is in contrast to the majority of the film, in which
taboo seems closer to a literary artifact than to any truly risked
confrontation.
Perhaps
the most troubling scene in the film belongs to the chapter entitled ‘The
Dangerous Men’. At this point in the narrative Joe believes her sexuality can
be awakened with men with whom she cannot communicate. Without language she
hopes sex can be as resurrected as instinctively physical and pure as possible.
She points out a group of men who are all black and all, apparently,
African. What follows is the most clumsy, painful and misguided scene in the
film. When Joe is met for sex she is greeted by, an unexpected, two men. The
two men, of large stature, then proceed to argue over who does what in
whatever, unsubtitled, language they are speaking. This scene is then followed
by a contrived, awkwardly framed and offensive discussion of Joe’s use of the
word ‘negro’ It is clearly Von Trier gleefully
teasing his image as a media controversy, a man accused (ridiculously) of Nazism…so
yes, it is another narcissistic whiff of self-parody. Problem being, the film
has neither the intelligence nor tact to approach this with anything other than
blundering self-assurance. As the only black characters introduced in the film,
regardless of Von Trier’s intention, it is a god-awful call of judgement. The
discussion of ‘political correctness’ that follows is a pathetically reductive
and uninspired defence, all the worse for its blatant ventriloquism of Von
Trier’s opinions.
| 'Silent Duck' |
Both
films undulate and meander with a ragged ambition. Not officially the
director’s cut, it is still too long while simultaneously bearing the scars of
occasionally awkward editing decisions. Sprawling and unresolved, it remains,
like any Von Trier film, an interesting and opinion-baiting piece.
Unfortunately, unlike the cohesive worlds of Antichrist and Meloncholia,
Nymph()maniac is less than the sum of
its parts. While I believe some elements in the film to be far stronger than
anything in either Antichrist or Meloncholia, it lacks the narrative
control to deliver its own potential. Certain scenes and ideas do stand out with
brilliance, and yet ultimately they are overwhelmed, lost in the vast overspill
of Von Trier’s fidgeting ego. 6.8/10
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