The Invisible Counterpoint

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 abo...

Christian Slater as the rescuing father Nymphomaniac A worn-out adventurer finds herself taken to a safe haven, encouraged to rest up and when ready, tell her tale. It's of being by society's definitions, an outcast. Someone who in simply following her natural instincts would find herself condemnation-worthy to most. The listener -- himself unusual, for being in his case asexual, and for having an allegiance to great voices of literature which span far beyond the contemporary and into truths never normal to the fearful median in any culture -- assures her at the finish of her tale that she should take pride in how she has lived. To have done other than she had would have been to have untrue to her life-instinct. So she's like a Lestat, just being natural to the vampiric -- to his own particular nature, that is -- commendable that much more because prosaic bourgeois society is possessed of a highly villainous aspect. It doesn't want to understand the Other, ju...