For those unfamiliar with Danish director Lars von Trier, try imagine the Kanye West of art cinema, as weird as that comparison might sound: a relentlessly affronting, foolishly outspoken lightning-rod of controversy and provocation, polarising viewers (see, my first instinct was to call them victims) everywhere his films may screen.
Also a solid entry into the Kanye West stratosphere of egotism: I cannot think of any other director who would include a promotional still of himself amongst the character posters for a recent marketing campaign. But the thing is von Trier is like a character within the fabric of his films: a cynical, sometimes sadistic, but unexpectedly humanistic puppet-master whose provocations feel to me more often barbed commentaries on the worst of human nature than they are self-conscious bids at notoriety – although, yes, there are plenty of those too. Hell, the very mention of the film Antichrist is enough to make vaginas everywhere quiver in fear.
Photo: Mad Man Entertainment
But when it was announced his next feature – the third in a loose thematic trilogy of films about women and mental illness – would be a portrait of one woman’s sexual maturation from age zero through to age 50, the response was one more of numbed amusement than of genuine shock. Of course, this is Lars Von Trier we are talking about. But shortly after, some curious updates began to trickle in – it would be about sex addiction, it would be four hours long, it would feature multiple scenes of un-simulated coitus with Shia LaBeouf – and everyone was gradually reminded that this is Lars von Trier we are talking about and no one would be getting off unprovoked.
Overseas, distributors of Nymphomaniac thought it wise to split the film into two separate volumes (which basically results in a blunt splicing at the halfway point) instead of even trying to sell a 250minute cut to audiences. They also generously provided the opportunity for each volume to be available on demand a full week before its respective cinematic release, because I suppose for some, watching graphic sex might be more palatable alone in their living rooms with the volume down and the blinds drawn, rather than shared with strangers in an awkward cinema setting. However, New Zealand audiences are currently without such a platform, and as such,Nymphomaniac is only available in one long, unabridged cut (replete with one intermission) in select theatres around the country.
At around the midpoint mark, Joe utters in panic “I don’t feel anything!” to her partner mid-coitus, and it occurred to me that only a moment ago, I’d just sat through a split-screen symphony of screwing and felt little of anything either
But, in all truth, it’s better that way. At four hours, any experience at the movies of this length is going to prove a little taxing, especially if it’s a corrosive odyssey of mental illness no less, but von Trier is undoubtedly on thrilling form here, and for the most part, Nymphomaniac is a tantalising cinematic degustation that’s easy to get lost in; a feast of rhythm and texture, exploring an expansive menu of aesthetic flourish - varying video formats, shifting aspect ratios, intermittent visual aids – with inexhaustible thirst. In a sense, this cinematic fervour mirrors the persuasion-turned-plight of his protagonist Joe (played both by newcomer Stacey Martin and von Trier-veteran Charlotte Gainsbourg), liberated at first by a feverish energy denying itself very few pleasures, and gradually decreasing in flavour the more that the affliction consumes. Eventually, we do feel that despairing, suffocating grasp natural to von Trier, but there’s enough tonal variance here – real invention, humour and beauty – to make this an unexpectedly brisk and never overbearing sit.
As for the sex: there’s certainly plenty of it, all as graphic and explicit as one might imagine, but it doesn’t take very long before, we too, grow numb to the parade. Nymphomaniac is obviously a film about addiction, so it makes perfect sense that von Trier proves thoroughly disinterested in “healthy” arousal; saturating the curiosity of the audience but never satisfying it (it seems we spend twice as long in excruciating sadomasochistic sessions with Billy Elliot as we do amongst the bed-sheets of any of Joe’s more accessible erotic engagements). Like von Trier’s formal energy on display in the first half, the treatment of sex, frank as it may be, is only ever to serve the psychological shifts in our lead’s trajectory, which means it’s largely captured with a mechanical disaffection. At around the midpoint mark, Joe utters in panic “I don’t feel anything!” to her partner mid-coitus, and it occurred to me that only a moment ago, I’d just sat through a split-screen symphony of screwing and felt little of anything either.
Yet arguably as explicit as all that sexual activity, and seemingly much more contentious, is the thematic discussion in play. If each entry of von Trier’s “Depression Trilogy” has been about the dual afflictions of external expectations and personal compulsions (and the tension between the two), then Nymphomaniac, as the closing statement of this particular study, transplants this subtext to the surface. The framing device – a back-and-forth between Stellan Skarsgard’s polymathic academic Seligman and Gainsbourg’s eponymous addict Joe – is where von Trier inserts himself as a central character of sorts; Seligman and Joe both providing loose proxies for a self-aware dialogue between both rational analysis and emotional reasoning; or as typical of the puppet-master, between filmmaker and narrative. Seligman’s didactic digressions – dispensing historical and philosophical allusions, offering primed metaphors to head each chapter, complaining about improbable coincidences in the story, etc – are the gleeful, witty intrusions of a filmmaker knowingly addressing his structure.
But even in the final stretch, as both strands of thought – analytical and emotional - reach their respective peaks, von Trier finds a way to allow his trademark cynicism to subvert the clarity. Without descending too deeply into spoiler territory, I can offer that Nymphomaniac closes on two acts of supreme contradiction, and in doing so, underlines what might just be the purpose of the exercise. It would seem this conversation is as much about art as an ideological vessel as it is about the actual ideologies in question, and there’s a distinct awareness that culminating in a conclusive monologue about hypocritical social mores or attitudes toward gender or the transformative power of love does little to ease how slippery these ideas actually are when translating into the real world. To reach an idealised set of ideological frameworks with which to interpret this odyssey of sex and pain, only to watch them both distorted by the ugliness of human impulse, may feel easy enough to dismiss as just another frustrating, distrustful “F—k You!” from one of contemporary cinema’s most infamous provocateurs. But I, for one, think cinema needs a good middle-finger every now and again.
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