Joe (Stacy Martin) learns about sexual pleasure in Lars von Trier’s controversial NYMPHOMANIAC
NYMPHOMANIAC: VOLUME 1 (Lars von Trier, 2013)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, 144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave., 212-875-5600
Landmark Sunshine Cinema, 143 East Houston St. between First & Second Aves., 212-330-8182
Opens Friday, March 24
www.magpictures.com
In Breaking the Waves, Danish Dogme 95 cofounder Lars von Trier’s 1996 breakthrough, Stellan Skarsgård plays a paralyzed man who convinces his wife (Emily Watson) to have sexual liaisons with other men and then tell him about the encounters in graphic detail. In von Trier’s latest controversial, polarizing work, Nymphomaniac: Volume 1, Skarsgård stars as Seligman, a single man who takes in a woman named Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) who is soon sharing her own sexual adventures with him, in extremely graphic detail. After finding Joe severely beaten in an alley, Seligman nurses her back to health while carefully listening to her life story. She repeatedly says she is a bad, irredeemable human being because of the things she has done, which started to go off the rails when she was a small child discovering the pleasure sensations to be had in her nether regions. Her sordid tale is told in flashbacks, as her younger self (Barking at Trees’ Stacy Martin) goes from lover to lover to lover to lover to lover ad infinitum. (The specific numbers are plastered over the screen.) Along the way, Seligman offers his own interpretation of her life, praising her sense of freedom while comparing her sexuality to fly-fishing, which von Trier (Dancer in the Dark, Melancholia, Antichrist) relates in a playful way that is at first absurdly silly but actually ends up coming together. Unfortunately, however, Martin is far too bland as Joe as she beds victim after victim, including Jerôme (a miscast Shia LaBeouf), perhaps the only one who truly loves her. And then the film abruptly ends, showing clips from Volume 2, which opens on April 4. As it turns out, there are multiple versions of Nymphomaniac: The four-hour edit, which has been shown internationally and at festivals, has been broken up into two parts in the United States, while a five and a half hour director’s cut will be released later this year. The result is that Nymphomaniac: Volume 1 feels like an unfinished movie, like something is missing, and indeed two hours (and more) are yet to come. The official press notes proudly confirm that “the films contain graphic depictions of sexuality to a degree unprecedented in a mainstream feature film,” while a disclaimer in the credits says that all scenes involving actual penetration, and there are several, were performed by body doubles. What does it all mean? We’re not really sure yet, because until we see Volume 2, we don’t feel comfortable either recommending or dismissing Volume 1 (which also features Christian Slater and Connie Nielsen as Joe’s parents and Uma Thurman as a scene-stealing wronged wife). But perhaps it says something that we still even want to see the second half, but then again, we’ve always been completionists, as well as gluttons for cinematic punishment.