Nymphomaniac: Volume I
AS a teen, she (Stacy Martin) is pale with an abyssal stare, her dead eyes distant with some half-forgotten dream. Together with her best friend B (Sophie Kennedy Clark), she prowls the train carriages in strawberry hot-pants and kohl-edged eyes, looking for guys to f**k in the bathroom.
Years later, she is an older woman named Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg), found in the aftermath of some attack, supine in a dark corridor. Her rescuer is a sympathetic ear, an old bachelor named Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård). He takes her back to his gentlemanly lodgings for tea, where she recounts a lifetime of sexual adventure — beginning with certain “kinetic” discoveries at the age of two — that have led her to self-diagnose nymphomania.
She self-annihilates and self-excoriates for her sociopathic urges which have led to the undoing of so many lives caught in her carnal mesh. He, ever the patient interlocutor, encourages her to make sense of her past, drawing on metaphors of fishing, music and mathematics.
And so begins the third and final act of Lars von Trier’s trilogy ( Antichrist, Melancholia ), as orchestral and overblown, intriguing and indulgent as the first two. Joe’s story is about her comings-of-age, the fraught climaxes with which she begins to understand her ambiguous power in a patriarchal world. She gives us a loose sprawl of clues with which to thread together a narrative, with which to seek order among all the signs of mere sexual chaos.
Seligman and the viewer become her confidantes and psychoanalysts. The film trembles from the dark whip of the unconscious. Joe narrates tales of her fantasy father (Christian Slater) and her induction into all-girl sex cults (“mea maxima vulva”, they chant). She moves from her virginal encounter with Jerôme (Shia LaBeouf) to the families fractured by her appetites. The sex is always clinical, mortal.
Joe’s existential crisis derives from her quest to “combat the love-fixated society”. For her, “love distorts things” and “the erotic is about saying yes”. In attributing such power to raw sensation, Von Trier crafts his embattled provocation against the most cherished platitudes of our benumbed, modern world — a bureaucratised planet that has lost the ability to feel. Nymphomaniac is a conflicted vision of a socially disturbing sexuality. — Kavish Chetty LS Kavish.chetty@gmail.com @kavishchetty