Nymphomaniac starring Charlotte Gainsbourg and Uma Thurman - film review

A graphic two-part grind through the abandoned sex life of one woman says more about the director Lars von Trier than anything
21 February 2014

You'll have seen those orgasm-face posters? All those actors — Willem Dafoe, Uma Thurman, Stellan Skarsgård, Christian Slater, Jamie Bell and all — giving it their best shot?

It’s just a prank. There’s none of that for them in Nymphomaniac. But then the film itself is best understood to be one long prank — four hours in the cut-down version being shown here, in two parts, from this weekend, five-and-a-half hours in the version Lars von Trier cut himself. The director is not so much an auteur as a provocateur. Always he’s trying to get a reaction, to cause a stir. Nothing else matters much.

Yet, if Nymphomaniac is at times quite rawly explicit, its structure is creakily bookish. On a rainy night, a monkish old man, Seligman (Skarsgård), discovers a badly beaten woman lying in the street, bleeding and semi-conscious, outside his flat. But Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) doesn’t want the police or an ambulance, just a cup of tea, she insists, in that wispy, girly voice. “It’s my fault, I’m just a bad human being,” she says. Seligman claims he’s never met a bad human being. “Well, you have now,” she tells him.

Sitting up in bed in his flat, in striped flannel pajamas, while Seligman listens, Joe, our nymphomaniac, launches into the story of her life. “I’ll have to tell you the whole story and it’ll be long — and moral, I’m afraid.” Episodic too, being presented as eight “chapters”, or extended vignettes. Seligman attends sympathetically and then, being an unworldly type, contributes comically irrelevant info of his own about fly-fishing, the Fibonacci sequence and polyphony in Bach (the latter as a comparison to the way Joe keeps different lovers on the go at the same time).

It’s such an old-fashioned “Are you sitting comfortably? Now we can begin” set-up. Moreover, its didacticism leads you to expect greater coherence than the film is able eventually to summon, for no psychological or even social explanation of why Joe is as she is ever emerges. She just says, “I discovered my c*** as a two-year-old”, and off we go.

We see her as a teenager, asking a loutish boy, Jerome, who is preoccupied with his moped, to take her virginity. He does so brutally, vaginally and anally. He is Shia LaBeouf, a misfortune in the film since he can’t act for toffee, and he turns out, through a series of deliberately implausible coincidences, to be the most significant man in Joe’s life, returning again and again.

In the film’s best scene, Joe comes a bit unstuck when, to her horror, one of her many lovers leaves his wife and children for her — and his raging wife (Uma Thurman, incandescent) turns up, kids in tow, to confront her with: “Would it be all right if I show the children the whoring bed?” But Joe is unmoved.

In the polyphony chapter she has it off with three different men on splitscreen, to the divine harmony of Ich ruf zu dir from Bach’s Orgelbüchlein. She sits by the deathbed of her father, with whom she shares a mythologised love of trees, but then disappears for rough sex with a random orderly. She marries Jerome, urging him to “fill all my holes”, only to find she has lost all sensation and can't reach orgasm any more.

In Volume II, Charlotte Gainsbourg, who doesn’t resemble Stacy Martin at all, but never mind, plays Joe and the degradation picks up pace. She masturbates so hard she rubs herself raw. She attends a sex-addict group but remains obdurately proud of her nymphomania. She arranges a liaison with a black man with whom she excitingly shares no language but he turns up with his brother, and, cocks sticking out in front of them, they argue incomprehensibly about who gets what in the sandwich and she loses interest. Abandoning her child and her marriage, she becomes enslaved to a chilly dominant, a true sadist, well played by Jamie Bell, the former child star of Billy Elliot, who straps her to a sofa and flogs her savagely in long and very explicit scenes (albeit using a body double).

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So what’s that moral? “I don’t know where we get our sexuality from,” is all Joe can say. Or else, in a moment of extreme affectation: “Perhaps the only difference between me and other people is that I’ve always demanded more from the sunset.”

Joe’s nymphomania doesn’t really make any sense, although Seligman earnestly congratulates her on having been a rebel against the gender expectations that have oppressed her and millions of other women. Despite its length (and clunky end), there’s really no convincing story here, no why, what or where. The film may be sort of set in Britain (it’s in English, they use sterling, LaBeouf puts on a ridiculous accent) but it’s just von Trier land (his phobias restrict his travel). The era is equally vague.

On the plus side, there is an unrehearsed raw presence to much of the acting, as a result of von Trier’s demanding methods — and the camera-work, perhaps by von Trier himself, has integrity too. Even as it turns boring, the film is not without power.

So what is going on here? Charlotte Gainsbourg, in her third von Trier film, can best tell us, maybe. She said quite casually in an interview: “Maybe there’s a lot of torture but that’s who he is. He’s portraying himself through women characters.” That’s it, then. Thanks, but no thanks.

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