By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 3 cats
Director: Lars Von Trier
Starring: Charlotte Gainsbourg | Christian Slater | Jamie Bell | Jean-Marc Barr | Mia Goth | Shia LaBeouf | Sophie Kennedy Clark | Stacy Martin | Stellan Skarsgård | Udo Kier | Uma Thurman | Willem Dafoe
Country: belgium, denmark, france, germany, sweden, united_kingdom, united_states
Year: 2014
Running time: 241
IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1937390/reference
Kyle says: “NYMPHOMANIAC Vol. 1 & Vol. 2 are recent works by the most provocative director on the current international cinema scene. Lars von Trier has been thrice recognized by Chlotrudis with nominations for Original Screenplay for DOGVILLE (2003), and for Direction of DANCER IN THE DARK (2000) and MELANCHOLIA (2011), and acknowledged many times by the Cannes Film Festival, as well as cinema societies throughout the world. His ANTICHRIST (2009) is remembered by New York Film Festival fans such as myself for audience members virtually leaping out of their seats and racing each other for the exits. Lars von Trier is even the recipient of an Oscar nomination shared with Sjón Sigurdsson (lyricist) and Björk (composer) for the song from DANCER IN THE DARK called ‘I’ve Seen It All’. And perhaps he has.
“NYMPHOMANIAC is actually a single work that was divided against its director’s wishes into two films, reportedly because of distributors’ concerns regarding its length. The original is actually spelled NYMPH()MANIAC, with a photograph of Lars von Trier contained in the vagina-suggestive parentheses, creating a whole with the words ‘nymph’ and ‘maniac’. The latter word is self-evident; the former refers to an early stage in the life of an insect, before it blossoms into fullness. When a combination of the two words is made, it becomes a woman with ‘abnormal’ or ‘excessive’ sexual desires, those clinical and dictionary boundaries of course defined by men. The word ‘nymphomania’ first appears in a book on nervous diseases by Dr. William Cullen in 1769, technically ‘furor uterinus’ or loosely ‘frenzy of the uterus’. In 1771, Dr. M.D.T. de Bienville published Nymphomania: Or, a Dissertation concerning the furor uterinus, clearly and methodically explaining the beginning, progress and different causes of that horrible distemper. The translation of this book from French to English by Dr. E.S. Wilmot in 1775 marks the first appearance of ‘nymphomania’ in the Oxford English Dictionary. Fanciful though it may be, an image of Lars von Trier reading Nymphomania will not leave my mind.
“The titular character Joe is played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, a von Trier collaborator on both ANTICHRIST and MELANCHOLIA. At the start she is rescued bloodied and beaten from a violent attack and taken to his home by passerby Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård), where she commences her life story in memoir-like chapters. In Vol.1 they are titled #1 ‘The Compleat Angler’, #2 ‘Jerôme’, #3 ‘Mrs. H.’, #4 ‘Delirium’, and #5 ‘The Little Organ School’; in Vol. 2 they are called #6 ‘The Eastern and the Western Church (The Silent Duck)’, #7 ‘The Mirror’, and #8 ‘The Gun’. Joe is more than willing to discuss her life story, offering immediately: ‘I’ve constantly used and hurt others for the sake of my own satisfaction’. And: ‘I discovered my power as a woman and used it without any concern for others’. Aside from Joe’s manipulative directness, von Trier clearly has much more on his mind than tits and ass, although there are enough of both that one can easily miss the forest for the trees. As she recounts the mathematics of first-time insertions into orifices and the numbers appear onscreen, we know that those numbers will reappear for future significance. Her rescuer likens the fury of fucking to fish in a feeding frenzy in his angling analogy; the fishing references come from the book by Izaak Walton (First Edition, 1653). And he then divides the world into those who cut the nails on their left hand first, and those who do the right hand first.
“The Jerôme of Chapter 2 is Shia LaBeouf, whom we have already encountered deflowering Joe in Chapter 1. The director’s continuing deconstruction of religious motifs is demonstrated through Joe and her school friends’ club called ‘The Little Flock’ chanting the blasphemous if hilarious ‘Mea Vulva, Mea Maxima Vulva!’ This becomes part of a reflection on the church’s ban of the evil tritone in Gregorian chant during the Middle Ages. The youthful rebellious schoolgirl Joe is admonished, ‘It’s nothing to smile about’ but she does just that, pleasuring herself with the pointer while looking at maps, as Seligman smiles beatifically at her story. An argument with her new boss Jerôme over a parking space is won by Joe with mathematical logic, diagramming that space and reminding us of the oppressive use of diagrams and outlines in DOGVILLE and MANDERLAY (2005). Maintaining that love distorts things and brings about something you haven’t asked for, Joe seems clear that her preference is for the unbridled erotic, comparing her genitalia to sliding glass grocery store doors repeatedly opening and closing. But the emotional impenetrability of Joe and her youthful avatars leaves her true feelings masked. In Chapter 2, the masculinity of those who must use a cake fork for pastry and those who cannot accomplish perfect parallel parking is belittled, while the idea of love is dismissed as nothing more than lust with jealousy added.
“The Mrs. H. of Chapter 3 is the wife of Mr. H. (Hugo Speer), who is leaving her for Joe. She is brilliantly played by Uma Thurman, in a florid set piece of self-flagellation, humiliation and passive-aggressive accusation, the audience for which is as much her uncomprehending young children as her guilty husband H. and the uncaring Joe. Mrs. H. asks: ‘How many lives do you think she has time to destroy in one day?’ The question goes unanswered when another sexual conquest arrives, and Joe decides, ‘Boys, I don’t love your father’. The H. family departs together but destroyed.
“The delirium of Chapter 4 starts with a reference to the death of Edgar Allan Poe in a book Seligman owns. But the chapter is about the delirium and death of Joe’s beloved father, ably acted by Christian Slater. Although he says as a doctor he does not fear death, he experiences horrible hallucinations and loses control of bodily functions prior to his death. Joe’s response to losing her father is to have sex with strangers in the hospital, before becoming depressed. Seligman responds sympathetically but fatuously, ‘It’s extremely common to react sexually in a crisis’. There follows a mesmerizing sequence, a standout even for the often-eccentric von Trier, in which Seligman plays a recording and comments on Bach’s ‘Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ!'(BWV 639,1713-1715), which translates ‘I call to you, Lord Jesus Christ!’ His explanation of cantus firmus and polyphony, and the mathematical mystique of both Bach’s genius and great art and architecture, brings us back to the numbers involved in Joe’s deflowering, and introduces the notion of Jerôme as the ‘cantus firmus’ in the multi-voice odyssey of the character Joe. Chapter 5’s ‘Little Organ School’ refers both to Bach’s ‘Orgelbuchlein’ and to Joe’s sexual saga. The climax is a lengthy graphic sex scene between Joe and Jerôme that ends with Bach suddenly interrupted and Joe announcing, ‘I can’t feel anything!’ as von Trier cuts to black, which is just where he started. It is only fair to mention that those who think they are watching Shia LaBoeuf and Charlotte Gainsbourg actually engaging in sexual intercourse are advised to avoid reading end title information.
“That NYMPHOMANIAC Vol. 2 is released as a separate movie is more a concession to audience patience than a distribution necessity (although I had no problem viewing both films consecutively). The problem for most audiences is that it plunges headlong into the S & M phase of Joe’s sexual odyssey, and much of that is hard to take. Von Trier is clearly unconcerned with audience comfort levels, as anyone who sat through ANTICHRIST can confirm. But Vol. 2 cannot stand alone and must be seen with the knowledge of Vol. 1. Joe and Jerôme are living together but their sex renders her both expressionless and insensate. Her story of floating over the ground during orgasm with similarly levitating girls on either side, in an open field at the age of twelve, inspires Seligman to conclude she has had a vision of Emperor Claudius’s wife Valeria Messalina (c. 20-48), possibly the most notorious nymphomaniac in history, and the Whore of Babylon. An exasperated Joe accuses Seligman of being unable to relate to her dirty stories, to which he replies that his asexuality makes him the perfect listener.
“What follows is a lengthy disquisition about the 1054 church schism resulting in the creation of Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox, the West representing the church of ‘suffering’ and the East the church of ‘happiness’ – ‘You’re moving away from guilt and pain towards joy and light’ says Seligman. So Joe perversely decides to reverse that journey, and the next chapter is called ‘The Eastern and the Western Church (The Silent Duck).’ As with everything in von Trier’s immensely complicated canvas, the significance of both silence and ducks is explained later. This chapter is the most event-oriented of all, complicated by sequencing back and forth in time.
“Von Trier raises the stakes with his audience in a sequence involving Jerôme challenging Joe to insert a spoon inside herself, which challenge she accepts by inserting multiple spoons; they clatter loudly to the restaurant floor as the couple depart. Joe accidentally becomes pregnant with Jerôme’s son, but instead of embracing maternity, she feels she is concealing a secret from the accusing eyes of their infant son Marcel. There is an outrageous segment of Joe dressing in frumpy clothes to freshen her sex life and disconnecting her car’s spark-plugs in a one-way street, leading to a reconsideration of the combinations of numbers possible, a return to the permutations of her original deflowering in two orifices, and to the numbers in Bach’s polyphony. As Joe feels sexual satisfaction moving farther beyond her reach, she arranges a hotel tryst with two well endowed African men; she cannot understand a word of their argument over which of her orifices to penetrate, which devolves into a classic von Trier provocation about the political correctness of words, and how that ultimately tears down democratic structures. In an argument with Seligman, Joe states: ‘Society is as cowardly as the people in it, who in my opinion are also too stupid for democracy’.
“Almost inevitably Joe comes into contact with a professional sadomasochistic sex therapist (I have no idea whether I am using the proper nomenclature) named K., played by Jamie Bell with an unsettling glint in his eyes that is obviously professional acting but disturbing nonetheless. Joe’s story about the whips used by K. introduces a welcome interruption by Seligman, who explains at length the origins of the Prusik Knot; Joe rejects this by saying, ‘I think this was one of your weakest digressions’. The amount of time Joe gradually consumes with K. is concretized by a horrifying scene of young Marcel wandering out to the apartment balcony to witness falling snow, while Handel’s breath-taking ‘Lascia c’io pianga’ from Rinaldo (1711) softly enters on the soundtrack. Anyone recalling ANTICHRIST will immediately connect that image with this music. In outrage at finding their son asleep in snow on the balcony, having had quite enough of their marital woes, Jerôme leaves Joe for good and places Marcel in a foster home, mother’s only contact with son being the monthly deposit she makes for his foster care.
“Penultimate chapter 7 is ‘The Mirror’ and marks a reference both to a mirror in Seligman’s place, and to the idea that Joe can start anew in sex addiction therapy by removing everything from her life that reminds her of sex. Which turns out to be virtually every single one of her possessions, to the accompaniment of Mozart’s Requiem (1791), including painting over a mirror and covering over windows. None of it works: At a meeting of her sex addiction group, Joe sees in a mirror her accusatory younger self, and denounces the chair as one of ‘society’s morality police’ who insure there is no room for her in their plans, just as she has no use for modern society — that groups like this are there to root out and reject women like her, and that members all have differing needs. Embracing her individuality as a sexual being labeled a nymphomaniac, Joe storms out of the meeting. Her story seemingly at an end, Joe is advised by Seligman to try another viewpoint, which she does by identifying a stain on the wall as not a revolver but a Walther PPK (James Bond novels and movies).
“Thus the final chapter becomes ‘The Gun.’ Joe turns to a life in organized crime as a debt collection specialist, her vast experience with sex, sadism, masochism, and emotional manipulation valuable tools for boss L. (Willem Dafoe), and her substantial compensation valuable for the care of son Marcel. L.’s suggestion that she train an apprentice results in a relationship with P. (Mia Goth), who is assigned her first solo job at the home of a man who turns out to be Jerôme (not played by Shia LaBoeuf in Chapter 8), with whom P. embarks on a sexual relationship. Joe’s penultimate humiliation is her failed attempt to shoot Jerôme, who beats her mercilessly and performs the same ritual rape in a dark alley as during her first time, leaving her in a bloody heap. The exhausted Joe tells Seligman she must sleep. Seligman has seemingly lied about being asexual. Joe uses the gun to prevent her final humiliation and runs off into the blackness.
“Some years ago, a close friend and I went to a performance by the New York Philharmonic of Gustav Mahler’s Eighth Symphony (1906), nicknamed ‘Symphony of a Thousand’ because of its vastness. At the conclusion, I whispered, ‘What was he thinking?’ and my friend answered, ‘Every thing!’ I have returned to that moment often in the days since I saw NYMPHOMANIAC. 5 cats
“Seen Tuesday, July 22, 2014, Amazon Instant Video, New York.”
I only made it through volume one, but I can honestly say this is the Lars von Trier film that broke me. I give up. 1 cat