Nymphomaniac – Volumes I and II 

Lars von Trier (2013)

I saw Volume I in the cinema and Volume II on BFI Player.  I can’t improve on the Wikipedia summary of the basic plot:

‘Nymphomaniac is a sexually explicit drama about a woman’s erotic journey from birth to the age of 50 as told by the main character, the self-diagnosed nymphomaniac, Joe. On a cold winter’s evening, the old, charming bachelor Seligman finds Joe beaten up in an alleyway. He brings her home to his flat where he tends to her wounds while asking her about her life. He listens intently as Joe, over the next eight chapters, recounts the lustful story of her highly erotic life. Seligman reads a lot of books, from which he has acquired various general knowledge. He connects the stories told with what he has read about.’

 It’s hard to know, especially in Volume I, how much of Nymphomaniac is meant to be funny.  Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) tells Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård) that, when she was two, ‘I discovered my cunt’, as if to suggest that nymphomania is a function of sexual precocity.  In the flashback which accompanies this revelation, she goes on to talk about her parents.  (This is the first of very many flashbacks – often simple visual illustrations of what the voiceover is saying.)   Joe’s doctor father (Christian Slater) is warm and affectionate, and she liked him; her mother (Connie Nielsen) is ‘what I guess you’d call a cold bitch’.  Charlotte Gainsbourg makes that line drily funny but does Lars von Trier intend it to be laughable when we then see a shot of the mother playing solitaire?

Seligman is the polar opposite of a nymphomaniac – he’s a man who’s never had sex.  Joe has spent her life with cocks, he’s spent his with books.  A particular childhood favourite was The Compleat Angler (sepia flashback to small boy taking book from library shelves).  When Joe describes what she, as a teenager, and her girlfriend did on a train journey (trying to have sex with as many male passengers as possible), Seligman compares the men in the carriages to fish in the water.  Perhaps his asexual analogy is meant to get a laugh but I wasn’t convinced that von Trier felt the same about Seligman’s verbal linkage of nymph (as used in fishing) and nympho – or that he (von Trier) got the sexual pun in fly-fishing.  (A certainly intentional moment of humour – and a successful one – comes when Joe and other girls at her school express their sexual fervour in a comically blasphemous chant, ‘Mea vulva, mea maxima vulva’.  An evangelical Christian flavouring, rather than the more obvious Catholic girlhood, would have allowed ‘I will make you fly-fishers of men’.)   When Seligman moves on to Fibonacci numbers (in relation to Joe’s fuck counts) and polyphony in Bach (cut to a choir), I doubt the effect is supposed to be as daft as it actually is.   It’s often the case that, when movies are culturally pretentious, they come over as bone-headed:  those who don’t consider cinema a true art must love Lars von Trier for making their case.

Joe, when Seligman first finds her beaten up and takes her home, tells him that it’s all her fault and that she’s a bad human being.  He replies that he’s never met a bad human being (proof that he needs to get out more) and she says, ‘Well, you have now’.  Neither she nor Seligman is religious and he is appalled that Joe holds onto sin in order to feel bad about herself – although, thanks to Charlotte Gainsbourg’s deliberately toneless line readings, Joe doesn’t sound as if she really feels self-reproachful or guilty.  The ideas in Nymphomaniac aren’t notably original:  for example, it’s soon clear that Joe wants all her countless relationships to be entirely sexual because love is a challenging complication.   Of the five chapters in Volume I, two are about something more than ‘pure’ sex.  The first, involving a young man called Jerôme (Shia LaBeouf), for whom Joe feels something other than sexual desire and in whose office she goes to work, is pathetic:  her ineptness in the workplace is mildly amusing but the relationship with Jerôme, without sex, is vacuous.  The second distinctive chapter, during which her father is dying in hospital and Joe keeps vigil by his bedside, is different.  Because you’ve seen Joe, for the most part, having it off, you can’t help but be struck by her doing something different on screen for a significant time.  Stacy Martin, who plays Joe as a teenager and some way beyond, isn’t, on the evidence of most of what she does, a talented actress but she does convey upset here.  Although Joe has told Seligman that she was fond of her father, she doesn’t go into the relationship further as she tells her tale.  But what’s revealed in the flashbacks is a different story – a clichéd one:  it suggests that, because she’s sexually attracted to the father whom she also loves, she wants only sex with all the other men she encounters (with the baffling exception of Shia LaBeouf’s unappealing Jerôme) so that she can remain Electra intacta.  Her heart belongs to daddy.  Given how much she thinks about her sexuality, Joe is slow and unimaginative in developing her tastes: her first lesbian partner (Mia Goth) materialises at the eleventh hour of Volume II and it’s well into the second film that that she decides to have it off with two black men (Kookie and Papou) who speak an African tongue that she doesn’t understand.

I’m not sure now what language I expected the film to be in but I remember registering slight surprise that it was English – although it’s English of a particularly tin-eared kind.  When her doctor father tells the young girl Joe that in winter, once their leaves have gone, you see the souls of trees, she expresses surprise – ‘for, by his own account, he had a preference for the empirical sciences’.  (Lars von Trier’s dialogue sometimes sounds like an academic equivalent of Abba lyrics.)  The stiff, prosy narrative, the often consciously artificial dialogue, the assorted accents and pretend accents of the international cast – these combine to give the film a peculiar locale:  although Joe appears to be growing up in this country, Nymphomania takes place in England and nowhere.  As she recounts the episode of the sex with Africans, Joe mentions ‘calling a spade a spade’.  Gainsbourg and von Trier must be aware of the racially offensive flavour of the phrase in this context yet the effect of the awkward English and its delivery is to make you wonder.  Lars von Trier isn’t one to let consistency of characterisation stand in the way of purple prose.   Joe has no sooner told Seligman that she’s a bad person than she announces that, ‘Perhaps the only difference between me and other people is that I’ve always demanded more from the sunset. More spectacular colours when the sun hit the horizon. That’s perhaps my only sin’.  (How would she know she’s uniquely demanding of sunsets?   She often comes across as egocentric rather than nymphomaniac.)  Although meant to be the carnal rather than the cultured one, Joe can take on Seligman at his own game when von Trier feels like it:  she names her (and Jerôme’s) son Marcel ‘after Mars, the God of war’.  Perhaps the crowning lines of dialogue are spoken by Seligman as Nymphomaniac Volume II enters the home straight.  He tells Joe:  ‘Although this sounds frighteningly like the clichés of our time and I’m predisposed to not holding your arguments, I’m too tired to argue’.   This consummately clumsy sentence comes close to expressing your own views about the movie by this stage in the proceedings.

Another late speech by Seligman is suddenly feminist – he tells Joe that if a man had done what she’s done in her life no one would have turned a hair.  This sounds suspiciously like von Trier asserting that everything that he’s put Joe through in the previous (nearly) four hours was based in a politically good cause.  Although there seems to be more talk between Joe and Seligman, and less action, in Volume II, what action there is (perhaps because there’s less of it) registers as more violent than in the first half.   As a highly organised sexual sadist called K (Joe’s partners, except for Jerôme, are known only by an initial), Jamie Bell is remarkably nuanced but von Trier cheats here too, for garish visual effect.  Joe interrupts K’s previous appointment with one of the female masochists who beat a path to his door.  K, obsessed with protocol, would not have allowed Joe to do this:  he would have sent her away and made her return at the appointed time.  Instead, he punishes her immediately for the infraction with a helping of keenly vicious flagellation (that’s fine by von Trier, of course).  Bell’s performance as K is a rare instance in Nymphomaniac of an actor’s creating a character persuasive enough to expose the writer-director’s fakery.  The child Joe is played at the ages of two, seven and ten by Ronja Rissmann, Maya Arsovic and Ananya Berg respectively:  all are more expressive than the older versions of Joe.  The quasi-religious vision experienced by the ten-year-old Joe – she sees Valeria Messalina and the Whore of Babylon rather than the Virgin Mary and Christian saints – brings about levitation and spontaneous orgasm:  although it’s a silly idea, this is quite an image and Ananya Berg plays the scene very well.  (The cast also includes, among many others, Willem Dafoe, Uma Thurman and Jean-Marc Barr.)

The two lead roles are impossibly schematic although, when Joe says to Seligman, ‘If you combine all the removed foreskin in history, it would reach to Mars and back again’, you have to admire Stellan Skarsgård for his straight-faced reaction.   (This is surely the Martian connotation that Joe should have had in mind when she named her son.)   Seligman is Joe’s first friend; in the final minutes of Nymphomaniac Volume II, she becomes his first sexual partner.  So is he, after all, really not the rare creature that he appeared to be – the one in a million (the film’s figure) who is not impelled by sex drives?  Or has Joe’s story whetted Seligman’s appetite for sex?  The simple answer is that Lars von Trier needs a shock ending.   Joe is horrified by Seligman’s sexualisation, which turns out to be a deathbed conversion.  You somehow knew that the gun which Joe found she was unable to fire at the aged Jerôme (Michael Pas), who bashed her up in the alleyway, would come in handy.

5 and 15 March 2014