Nymphomaniac Vol I & II (18.)
Directed by Lars Von Trier.
Starring Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgard, Stacey Martin, Shia LaBeouf, Christian Slater, Uma Thurman and Jamie Bell. 118 & 123 mins
The cliché of the sad clown is well established but there’s no equivalent for the prankster. The Noels, the Beadles and their ilk are always assumed to be blithely unaware of their own wretchedness. Lars Von Trier has carved out an improbable role as an arthouse prankster for himself. His previous film was called Melancholia and dealt with the end of the world and was enormously glum but with a larky spirit. So when he declared he was in the middle of a trilogy about the depression he suffered from it was taken with a pinch of salt. Not after Nymphomaniac though. This is the work made from the bottom of a pit of despair and the view if pure darkness.
That’s not to say it is without humour. The () poster and the one with cast members making their “Oh” faces is true to its irreverent spirit. There’s lots of laughter, but no pleasure. The film is framed as a dialogue between civilisation and nihilism. Skarsgard, an eclectically cultured man and enthusiastic angler, finds Gainsbourg lying bloody and beaten in a back street and takes her home and insists on hearing her desperate life story. It is a story of miserable sexual addiction, told in eight chapters. Having lost her virginity at 15, at her own prompting, to Shia LaBeouf doing a British accent, hers is a life of continual disappointment. For each of her degenerate tales he offers a justification or explanation for her behaviour taken from religion, philosophy, literature, mathematics or even fishing.
With its Nympho and the Fisherman premise,it's no surprise the film is rooted in bad jokes and cruel puns. It’s aiming to pull down everything and every tenet of civilisation is rubbished. Of course, attacking Bach, Beethoven, Freud, Christ, Kubrick and Dickens is one thing, but when you challenge the primacy of sexual pleasure you really are striking at everything modern society holds dear. The title is an inversion of Trainspotting: it is taking a seedy, sleazy notion and showing it to be a dull and repetitive chore.
Nymphomaniac is a tiresome provocation that any civilised audience should reject and I tried dear reader, I tried. The preposterously bad dialogue in the first hour had me turned against it but by the time the credits rolled on the end of Vol I it had me hooked. (If you are going to do it, it really ought to be in a down-in-one four hour splurge.)
How come? Possibly despite himself, Von Trier invests the film with a misanthropic exuberance, which coupled with his directorial skills, make for a formidable combination. Nympho seems to be a culmination of all he has learned and all his experiments conducted over 30 years of filmmaking. It’s flippant and facile, childishly provocative, yet bears a fearsome weight which is hard to deny.
Plus his cast really come through for him. Outside of Gainsbourg and Stacey Martin, the unknown who plays the younger version primarily in Vol 1, they are largely a collection of wash ups and dead eyed Hollywood time servers but LVT finds unexpected life in them. Skarsgard, Thurman, Slater haven’t been this good in decades; LaBeouf ever. At the centre of it is Gainsbourg, a remarkable performer who can embody any paradox asked of her, a beautiful sophisticated elegant woman who still has direct access to her inner child. I wish she could be persuaded to do something other than be degraded by Lars von Trier for hours on end.
Directed by Lars Von Trier.
Starring Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgard, Stacey Martin, Shia LaBeouf, Christian Slater, Uma Thurman and Jamie Bell. 118 & 123 mins
The cliché of the sad clown is well established but there’s no equivalent for the prankster. The Noels, the Beadles and their ilk are always assumed to be blithely unaware of their own wretchedness. Lars Von Trier has carved out an improbable role as an arthouse prankster for himself. His previous film was called Melancholia and dealt with the end of the world and was enormously glum but with a larky spirit. So when he declared he was in the middle of a trilogy about the depression he suffered from it was taken with a pinch of salt. Not after Nymphomaniac though. This is the work made from the bottom of a pit of despair and the view if pure darkness.
That’s not to say it is without humour. The () poster and the one with cast members making their “Oh” faces is true to its irreverent spirit. There’s lots of laughter, but no pleasure. The film is framed as a dialogue between civilisation and nihilism. Skarsgard, an eclectically cultured man and enthusiastic angler, finds Gainsbourg lying bloody and beaten in a back street and takes her home and insists on hearing her desperate life story. It is a story of miserable sexual addiction, told in eight chapters. Having lost her virginity at 15, at her own prompting, to Shia LaBeouf doing a British accent, hers is a life of continual disappointment. For each of her degenerate tales he offers a justification or explanation for her behaviour taken from religion, philosophy, literature, mathematics or even fishing.
With its Nympho and the Fisherman premise,it's no surprise the film is rooted in bad jokes and cruel puns. It’s aiming to pull down everything and every tenet of civilisation is rubbished. Of course, attacking Bach, Beethoven, Freud, Christ, Kubrick and Dickens is one thing, but when you challenge the primacy of sexual pleasure you really are striking at everything modern society holds dear. The title is an inversion of Trainspotting: it is taking a seedy, sleazy notion and showing it to be a dull and repetitive chore.
Nymphomaniac is a tiresome provocation that any civilised audience should reject and I tried dear reader, I tried. The preposterously bad dialogue in the first hour had me turned against it but by the time the credits rolled on the end of Vol I it had me hooked. (If you are going to do it, it really ought to be in a down-in-one four hour splurge.)
How come? Possibly despite himself, Von Trier invests the film with a misanthropic exuberance, which coupled with his directorial skills, make for a formidable combination. Nympho seems to be a culmination of all he has learned and all his experiments conducted over 30 years of filmmaking. It’s flippant and facile, childishly provocative, yet bears a fearsome weight which is hard to deny.
Plus his cast really come through for him. Outside of Gainsbourg and Stacey Martin, the unknown who plays the younger version primarily in Vol 1, they are largely a collection of wash ups and dead eyed Hollywood time servers but LVT finds unexpected life in them. Skarsgard, Thurman, Slater haven’t been this good in decades; LaBeouf ever. At the centre of it is Gainsbourg, a remarkable performer who can embody any paradox asked of her, a beautiful sophisticated elegant woman who still has direct access to her inner child. I wish she could be persuaded to do something other than be degraded by Lars von Trier for hours on end.
