“I’m going to make a porn film with these two,” Charlotte Gainsbourg remembers her Melancholia director Lars von Trier telling the press, indicating her and Kirsten Dunst. Nymphomaniac sounds like that film. In fact it’s another sometimes baggy, sometimes gripping study of a female rebel’s psychological state. Gainsbourg’s Joe (pictured below), is a nymphomaniac, but the erections and penetrations which mark her passage through the world are both fundamental and incidental. Porn is the aspect of sex this film is least interested in.
When wide-eyed, monkish Stellan Skarsgård finds a badly beaten Joe in the street, back in his flat he turns her into Scheherazade, spinning the tale of how she got there till morning. Skarsgård’s finely modulated performance as the voice of moral reason is loving and, like much of the film, dryly hilarious. Joe, played in flashback for the first half by Stacy Martin, moves from the safety of Christian Slater’s adored Dad to self-destructive, self-willed, self-creating sex with every sort of man, meeting Shia LaBeouf, Uma Thurman, Willem Dafoe and a passing Udo Kier on the way.
As usual with von Trier, he requires his international cast to speak awkwardly precise Danish English. They live in a pornographic fairy tale almost-England, where Billy Elliott’s Jamie Bell has grown up to punch willing women in the face.
The extras include four “come-face” postcards, interviews with the main cast, and a Q&A. After previous films’ on-set horror stories, the actors’ adoration of “lovely”, “vulnerable”, “protective” Lars is one of this release’s bigger shocks. Gainsbourg’s belief that his films’ battered female characters are parts of himself adds to the slippery, high-wire nature of Nymphomaniac’s feminism.
Joe’s masochism blooms outwards towards the end, into criminal sadism. It’s part of the healing process, just as Antichrist, Melancholia and this (very) relatively impish film have been for von Trier’s own crippling depression. The provocations which pad out Nymphomaniac’s four hours sometimes seem elaborate smokescreens to obscure a few heartfelt scenes, of a father’s death, or cosmic loneliness.
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