Film Review | Nymphomaniac Vol. 1

“People forget that the brain is the biggest erogenous zone,” pornographer Jackie Treehorn (Ben Gazzara) utters around mid-way through the cult Coen Bros comedy The Big Lebowski (to which Jeff Bridges’s ‘The Dude’ mordantly replies, “On you, maybe.”)

We’re meant to take it as a preposterous quote by an equally preposterous character – Treehorn just wants to segue into a discussion about ‘revolutionary’ virtual-reality pornography that he’s experimenting with – but in the context of Danish director Lars Von Trier’s latest, two-part arthouse shocker Nymphomaniac (whose second ‘volume’ will be released locally on July 9), the theory may just fly.

For while Nymphomaniac Vol. 1 does have a female sex addict as a protagonist – in the form of Von Trier-regular Charlotte Gainsbourg; whose younger, in-extended-flashback iteration is played by startling newcomer Stacy Martin – its real pleasures (if they can be called as such; perhaps ‘curiosities’ would be better) lie in the zany intellectual acrobatics that the ever-controversial writer-director indulges in this story-within-a-story.

We meet our protagonist, Joe (Gainsbourg) as she lies sprawled on the snow-capped ground, apparently left for dead. Coming across her by accident, the kindly Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård) allows her to convalesce in his guest bedroom and, over several cups of tea (“with milk”) is regaled to her life story: which, Joe is at pains to assure him, is nothing but the life of a bad human being.

Joe’s self-loathing stems from what appears to be her life-long sex addiction, which leads to misadventures and morally – as well as, erm, physically – sticky situations. Charting her journey from childhood to adolescence, Joe’s account is unapologetic – though whether it’s entirely factual is left for us to grapple with – but Seligman insists on justifying her unsavoury escapades within an intellectual framework that incorporates everything from the Fibonacci sequence, angling and the music of Johann Bach…

Though some may consider the Euro-cinema mainstay Von Trier as being a firm beacon of the ‘arthouse’ cinema camp – and this includes our local multiplex, Eden Cinemas – the fact remains that for all his taboo pushing antics and shock tactics, he’s a director with an established aesthetic ‘brand’, whose projects have the power of magnetically attracting an international array of film stars – Hollywood players included – and whose films, love them or hate them, are eagerly anticipated, heartily consumed and hotly debated.

So there’s little, really, to statistically differentiate Von Trier from his Hollywood counterparts. And though the marketing campaign which led to the release of Nymphomaniac may have fallen on the kookier side of things – posters depicting the actor’s faces mid orgasm; oblique, largely uneventful ‘appetizer’ clips culled from individual ‘chapters’ of the film – it also shrewdly and cheekily manipulated audience expectation, openly provoking while also stoking curiosity at every turn.

This impish approach is mirrored in the film itself, where playful – even post-modern – irony appears to be the order of the day, with nothing being taken entirely seriously and being left at the mercy of Von Trier’s feverish mind games.

It’s a double-provocation: it’s a film which calls itself ‘Nymphomaniac’, and comes crammed (look, anything will be double-entendre worthy at this point, so let’s just ignore it and sail on) with explicit sex scenes, but which then uses the mouthpiece of the stodgy, scholarly mouthpiece of Seligman to turn it all into a free-association intellectual puzzle.

This may feel indulgent to some, but delectable to others, especially given Von Trier’s effortless hand at injecting left-field backdrops and stylistic touches.

Barring Shia LaBeouf’s cack-handed attempt at a British accent, the cast is on top form, with the fragile – but fearless – Stacy Martin predictably stealing the show. Hollywood actors are allowed to spread their wings too, though.

Once-heartthrob Christian Slater delivers a surprisingly tender performance as ‘Joe’s Father’, particularly in the film’s penultimate chapter, depicting his collapse to cancer in a black-and-white sequence entitled Delirium (in another example of Von Trier’s playful approach, discussion about madness gives Seligman an excuse to indulge in an Edgar Allan Poe quote).

Uma Thurman – embittered wife to one of Joe’s many sexual partners – delivers one of the most uncomfortable scenes in the film with gusto; a reminder that this striking actress remains underused by Hollywood at large (at least, by film directors who aren’t Quentin Tarantino).

Sharply split between an expression of predatory carnal desire (Joe) and cold academic inquiry (Seligman) the film is both too hot and too cold, puppet-mastered by Von Trier, perhaps a tad too neatly. But it remains a crazy, inspired fever dream. Let’s see what its second half has in store.

Nymphomaniac: Vol. 2 will be showing at Eden Cinemas from July 9