Richard Brody wrote:
What
the four-hour run of the two “volumes” of Lars von Trier’s “Nymphomaniac” shows
and says about its protagonist is trivial, but what it reveals about von Trier
and his method is worth considering.
A
man returning from a small convenience store finds a woman lying—torpid and
bleeding—in a sepulchral courtyard. She refuses medical care, refuses the
police, but will accept a cup of tea, and goes with him to his apartment. She’s
Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg); he’s Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård). After getting
cleaned up, she rests in his bed and tells him the story of her life, which is
mainly the story of her sex life. Throughout the telling, the quietly fanciful
Joe, a sort of erotic Scheherazade, intently affirms a vague and unnamed guilt
that the polymathic scholar Seligman tries to reason her out of.
Joe’s
precocious genital consciousness led her to follow the lead of a high-school
friend, called B (Sophie Kennedy Clark), in a game of sexual conquests aboard a
train. (Young-adult Joe is played by Stacy Martin.) In her independent life,
Joe often took as many as ten lovers in a single night. Some of them are young,
some old; some handsome, some plain; some fit, some flabby; some stylish, some
lumpish. And if there’s any doubt of their variety, a montage of lovers’
genitals, seen in close-up, makes the point: Joe doesn’t pursue a parade of
groomed beauties or well-endowed studs, she has sex with a seemingly
representative slice of the male demographic. And Joe, apparently, is not
alone—she’s only one member of a group that formed in school, a secret sect of young
women, or, as B called it, a “little flock,” that chants “mea vulva, mea maxima
vulva,” and repudiates love in the sole pursuit of sex.
This
indiscriminacy—the choice of partners not by beauty, charm, or charisma but on
the basis of what Joe calls “morphological studies”—is the key to the movie’s
pitch. Von Trier is the best advertising person in the movie business, and he
has come up with a movie that is an ingenious commercial for itself. The
average male art-house viewer emerges from the first part of Volume I filled
with the pleasant idea that there are young women out there—young, pretty,
sleek, and determined—who will suck him off in a random train compartment even
though he’s forty, married, and faithful, or sleep with him on a regular basis
despite his bald pate, bad clothing, bland affect, and blubbery gut.
[…]
“Nymphomaniac”
is von Trier’s sexual tantrum, a cinematic declaration against faithfulness.
For von Trier, love means having to do things you don’t want to do at a given
moment, whether it’s sleeping at home beside your spouse when a momentarily
more enticing lover awaits or having Sunday dinner at the in-laws. Love means
always having to say you’re sorry. And far from being sorry, he’s cavalierly
indifferent. Along the way, he offers repellently racist words and gags along
with a sophistical endorsement of them; a definition of a good Jew (wanna
guess? “anti-Zionist”); a repudiation of therapy (old news chez von Trier); a
revulsion at parenthood; and a generalized sense (rendered as a specific visual
metaphor in Vol. II) that any attempt to defer or deflect immediate sexual
gratification is a mortification that leads swiftly to a total monastic
repudiation of life itself.
[…]
Actually,
there is one sequence that von Trier films with care and passion.
[…]
The
masochistic relationship is what von Trier films with an almost palpable sense
of excitement. What’s notable about those scenes is the way that they define
the sadist (a man, called K, played by Jamie Bell) and leave his motives
undefined. He, not Joe (now the adult, maternal Joe, played by Gainsbourg), is
the focus of these scenes, and the meticulous practicality of his
ministrations, as well as his overt, robust, nearly gleeful vigor in inflicting
pain, is the sole focus of von Trier’s visual pleasure.
[…]
The
core fantasy is of a woman who is man’s random source of pleasure and who, when
she withholds herself from manhood at large because of her emotional bonds (or
would take other action resulting from those bonds), von Trier sees fit to
punish her for it, brutally. And the woman finds that punishment just and apt,
not requiring redress of any sort.
[…]
-----
Patrick McEvoy-Halston
She comes across mostly as a rebel --
I'm not sure how well male viewers are avoiding situating themselves inside
her, experiencing her as their avatar. Going through the train might have
brought to the fore our own memories of having done something generically akin
to that -- the specifics concerning the man who had to be sucked off to win the
candy might not be that important if we were conceptualizing him mostly as the
tough-get we were once obligated to chase down to make up for previous losses.
In regards to the man with the blubbery gut, this was the part of the film
where after shucking off societal norms she was figuring out what actually would
meet her needs -- I'm wondering if even this male viewer was too much indulging
in this "Groundhog Day," what if there are no rules? possibility to
be stepping outside her much, even when his likeness in physique and affect is
draped into view as a draw.
I appreciate your concerns about how
love is portrayed, but somehow despite the interest von Trier takes in the
sadomasochism, she still came across here as the getting-on, hopeless addict,
who lost a better happiness for some mid-life crisis, crazy thrill-ride. This
might say something about what Labeouf brought to the film.
Parenting and therapy is refuted, but
it can seem her loss. Seligman might not have much of a draw for her -- she can
be pretty cold, brutal to him -- but I thought they both would have done well
if they'd ended up friends, a la "Breakfast Club." Both decent
listeners; willing to offer feedback and also open to being proven wrong. His
being so excited at being able to relate his book knowledge to her experience,
is pretty compelling -- and I don't think she was quite immune. I also enjoyed
some of the moments she shared with her "adopted daughter," as well
as with her father. Von Trier's excitement for the violence, is no friend to
the human warmth that is in the film.
specialtramp @AyeEye
If interviews are anything to go by the
depression you refer to is the director's own. Why, then, make a trilogy of
movies about depressed women whose sexuality goes off the rails? In Antichrist
Gainsbourg's character's sexual desires lead indirectly to the death of her
child (punishment) and then directly to the her murder of her husband and
suicide. Here Gainsbourg abandons her family because she wants more sex, even
though she gets no pleasure from it.
IOW, why not a male protagonist? (Here's
a trick, if you're not sure if something is misogynist, imagine a man in the
same role/position, ask yourself "Is it degrading, humiliating or just
plain wrong?" and then ask yourself why.)
What's feminist about a woman
who compulsively has sex she doesn't enjoy, and yet believes she deserves
punishment for it. Scratch that - what's *interesting*, new or insightful about
watching a female character who compulsively has sex she doesn't enjoy, and
then gets punished for it? I believe the descriptions of critics claiming the
films aren't pornographic but I'm pretty sure Von Trier is getting off
here.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston@specialtramp
I'm glad he did so, though. A mother's
willingly torturing her child -- the big reveal in Antichrist -- is
pretty much beyond what any of us can tackle right now. The limits of therapy
were helpfully revealed, when her husband realizes why he was having so much
trouble dissuading her she was evil -- "You did ... what?!"
This film
teased at an explanation, beyond evil. The child's abandoned because it's seen
as something which mocks and laughs at you when you so desperately are in need
of the opposite. And the reason why you need so much, and why you'd spend your
life throwing yourself at the rescuing-knight male sex, is because you had a
"cold bitch" mother who turned her back on you. Isn't that why the
final scene in Antichrist -- men had thus far proved irrelevant to the fates
passed on through the mother-daughter dyad? Willem Dafoe was beginning to get
it; Seligman was a step back.
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