"Nymphomaniac: Volume I" (2014)

Lars von Trier, ever since the day of Dogma 95, has always hated complacency. He finds Hollywood narratives lull us into a false sense of comfort, and his films seek to shake us out of our supposed stupor. His latest film Nymphomaniac: Volume I is yet another provocation right from the tantalizing and twisted hook: a sex addict recounts the stories of her many, many sexual encounters. But von Trier has more in mind beyond shock and awe for anyone who cares to pay attention. The film is doubtless to end up as no one’s cup of tea, and, intentionally, that’s part of the point. Yet von Trier is reaching for his usual obsessions of gender, sexuality and power; he simply buries the lede (purposely, I hasten to add), shoving them to the background of situations either shocking or caustic. There’s a consistent sense like many of von Trier’s other films of shoving our face in things we don’t particularly wish to witness and lingering on them to an excruciating length. 

Nymphomaniac begins with Joe (Stacy Martin as a young woman and Charlotte Gainsborough later in life) being discovered by the kindly Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård) bloody and bruised, lying in a snow covered alleyway. A deeply self-loathing Joe has resigned herself to certain Puritanical notions of her sexual conquests, seeing an unforgivable, even highly sinful, destructive path left in the wake of her bottomless desires. Joe tells of her sexual adventures starting from her earliest discoveries of her own sexuality, while Seligman consistently butts in, trying to bring order and possibly insight to Joe’s clinically portrayed life story. Von Trier tells the story in chapters, breaking down Joe's life into different segments, told in highly different tones and styles. The story isn’t entirely painful or disturbing; von Trier manages some hilarious moments, and not always through sheer discomfort. 

While a lot of sex drives the narrative, it really isn’t the singular concern. Von Trier is interested in how we use sex to define ourselves, to control people, to empower and undermine ourselves, and how sex can be an act of performance. He’s using sex as a complex intersection between gender, class, privilege, power and identity. He also takes seriously Joe’s addiction and how it slowly and insidiously eats away at every aspect of her life. For Joe, sex provides pleasure but it is also an act of sublimation and self-annihilation. Much of Nymphomaniac concerns itself with the ways people fall into holding patterns; it’s at times frustratingly repetitious but that’s because it forces us into the mind of someone who doesn’t know how to, and possibly doesn’t even want to, change. Joe thinks she’s doomed, but von Trier offers up something far less fatalistic (thankfully and surprisingly after the despairing Antichrist and Melancholia)

This is an incomplete work, and not all of this works, but anything this ambitious and audacious is more interesting and, at times, more compelling than anything else currently out there. But even if part two misses the mark, it will likely do so in highly over-reaching and fascinating ways. 

Grade: B+