Nymphomaniac: Vol. I (2013)
Directed by Lars von Trier
A man named Seligman finds a fainted wounded woman in an alley and he brings her home. She tells him that her name is Joe and that she is nymphomaniac. Joe tells her life and sexual experiences with hundreds of men since she was a young teenager while Seligman tells about his hobbies, such as fly fishing, reading about Fibonacci numbers or listening to organ music.
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41 films that influenced Nymphomaniac: Vol. I
What critics say influenced Nymphomaniac: Vol. I
In returning to sources (Tarkovsky is referenced multiple times throughout, one chapter title included), examining the self (a particularly on-the-nose Antichrist callback emerges; maybe as a joke, maybe not) and making convergences (yet another image of a Gainsbourg character lying in a field makes way for a pronounced Stalker homage), a genuine softness and delicacy — melancholy, one might say — runs through the current of sex and recklessness.
After all, he is a Danish arthouse director in his late 50s, working on relatively modest budgets while tackling the biggest themes imaginable - the end of the world in Melancholia (2011), the origins of evil in Antichrist (2009), and, now, in his two Nymphomaniac films, the nature of female sexuality.
While Gainsbourg – the daughter of another great sexual and artistic provocateur: the Gallic icon Serge Gainsbourg – may be initially perceived as another in von Trier’s long line of damaged female characters (see the director’s Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, and Antichrist for reference), it’s her character’s younger self, played with wide-eyed coquettishness by Stacy Martin, who initiates the dirty deeds that make up the main story.
But compared to some of his previous movies (the dreadful “Antichrist”, with its hacked genitals and interminable howling, for example), “Nymphomaniac” hardly plays like von Trier’s big “f*** you”.
Von Trier ("Melancholia," "Antichrist") brings dry humor to the movie's mix of crude language, anatomical close-ups and erudite sexual metaphors: Fly-fishing, Bach fugues and even parallel parking are accompanied by on-screen diagrams and other visual aids.
Now, after the epic misery of Dancer in the Dark, Antichrist and Melancholia , he returns to the mischievous spirit of The Idiots with what is arguably his greatest film so far, a colossal saga of lust and life, a magnum opus that recapitulates everything he has done before, encapsulating major themes, character types and even scenes from previous films, and integrating them into an ambitious, intelligent and vivid work of tremendous depth and breadth.
In returning to sources (Tarkovsky is referenced multiple times throughout, one chapter title included), examining the self (a particularly on-the-nose Antichrist callback emerges; maybe as a joke, maybe not) and making convergences (yet another image of a Gainsbourg character lying in a field makes way for a pronounced Stalker homage), a genuine softness and delicacy — melancholy, one might say — runs through the current of sex and recklessness.
After all, he is a Danish arthouse director in his late 50s, working on relatively modest budgets while tackling the biggest themes imaginable - the end of the world in Melancholia (2011), the origins of evil in Antichrist (2009), and, now, in his two Nymphomaniac films, the nature of female sexuality.
The end result is a passable yet disappointing effort from von Trier, with the movie's mild success ultimately ensuring that it remains a cut above the majority of his output (ie this is a masterpiece compared to, say, Melancholia).
Von Trier ("Melancholia," "Antichrist") brings dry humor to the movie's mix of crude language, anatomical close-ups and erudite sexual metaphors: Fly-fishing, Bach fugues and even parallel parking are accompanied by on-screen diagrams and other visual aids.
Von Trier throws in a “cunt” here and there to break the gentle mood, but this early segment of the film is mostly soft and wistful in the vein of his Melancholia .
Also in the mix are Antichhrist and Melancholia ’s love of big themes and extremes.
But von Trier constantly sabotages a grander statement, much the same way he torpedoed his apocalyptic previous film Melancholia at Cannes by making ill-advised Hitler references.
Still, the philosophical feminist precedent to beat is still Agnès Varda’s chilling, scorchingly defiant Vagabond (1985), which limns an antisocial odyssey to the edge of extinction without resorting to semi-porn.
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He even throws in a few references to Tarkovsky’s most austere film, Andrei Rublev (about a medieval Russian icon painter), to underline his seriousness.
Also lurking in the artistic weeds—notably a home invasion—are quiet references to Stanley Kubrick’s masterful (and also classical-rich) A Clockwork Orange (cross-reference below).
These and other flashes of whimsy help enliven what would otherwise be a dreary procession of what A Clockwork Orange’s priapic Alex, a kindred spirit, called “the old in-out, in-out.”
As the two continue to talk, such concepts as 'love equals lust plus jealousy' are introduced, especially when Joe continues to run into Jerome (in one instance recalling Steven Shainberg's S&M romance "Secretary") and finds herself 'in love.' Seligman is astounded by Joe's answer to his question about which hand's nails she cuts first, his measure of whether a person is light-hearted or serious.
The entire enterprise has a whiff of homage to the Golden Age of Arty Porn, the ’70s, when pretentious life narrations interrupted the assorted exotic sexual encounters of “Emmanuelle” or “The Story of O.” It’s “The Story of Joe.”
Pitched somewhere between the metaphysical porno of Gerard Damiano's The Devil in Miss Jones and the softcore breast-beating of Just Jaeckin's The Story of O , Von Trier's still unspooling magnum opus is an exhausting orgy of heady ideas and groiny spectacle that veers wildly between the profound, the comic and the ridiculous – not always intentionally (a dopey shaggy-dog punchline almost proves its undoing).
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Gainsbourg narrates in a flat, uninflected monotone; Martin, during the act, is usually staring blandly into space, like Jane Fonda in "Klute."
The whole temperature of a film can be heavily influenced, even determined, by the heat a particular actress provides, so one can only wonder what Nymphomaniac would have been like had von Trier sought and found an equivalent of, say, Julie Christie in Billy Liar, Eva Green in The Dreamers or Jennifer Lawrence in almost anything.