Lars Von Trier’s Joyless Sexual Tantrum

What the four-hour run of the two “volumes” of Lars von Trier’s “Nymphomaniac” shows and says about its protagonist is trivial, but what it reveals about von Trier and his method is worth considering.

A man returning from a small convenience store finds a woman lying—torpid and bleeding—in a sepulchral courtyard. She refuses medical care, refuses the police, but will accept a cup of tea, and goes with him to his apartment. She’s Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg); he’s Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård). After getting cleaned up, she rests in his bed and tells him the story of her life, which is mainly the story of her sex life. Throughout the telling, the quietly fanciful Joe, a sort of erotic Scheherazade, intently affirms a vague and unnamed guilt that the polymathic scholar Seligman tries to reason her out of.

Joe’s precocious genital consciousness led her to follow the lead of a high-school friend, called B (Sophie Kennedy Clark), in a game of sexual conquests aboard a train. (Young-adult Joe is played by Stacy Martin.) In her independent life, Joe often took as many as ten lovers in a single night. Some of them are young, some old; some handsome, some plain; some fit, some flabby; some stylish, some lumpish. And if there’s any doubt of their variety, a montage of lovers’ genitals, seen in close-up, makes the point: Joe doesn’t pursue a parade of groomed beauties or well-endowed studs, she has sex with a seemingly representative slice of the male demographic. And Joe, apparently, is not alone—she’s only one member of a group that formed in school, a secret sect of young women, or, as B called it, a “little flock,” that chants “mea vulva, mea maxima vulva,” and repudiates love in the sole pursuit of sex.

This indiscriminacy—the choice of partners not by beauty, charm, or charisma but on the basis of what Joe calls “morphological studies”—is the key to the movie’s pitch. Von Trier is the best advertising person in the movie business, and he has come up with a movie that is an ingenious commercial for itself. The average male art-house viewer emerges from the first part of Volume I filled with the pleasant idea that there are young women out there—young, pretty, sleek, and determined—who will suck him off in a random train compartment even though he’s forty, married, and faithful, or sleep with him on a regular basis despite his bald pate, bad clothing, bland affect, and blubbery gut. The only stumbling block is love. Love, as detailed by Joe and as shown in a variety of episodes throughout the film, is the curse that gets in the way of pleasure. Joe herself turns out to be something of a fallen woman—she fell in love with a man named Jerôme (Shia LaBeouf) and that love, their marriage, proved to be the ultimate thwarting of sexual pleasure.

“Nymphomaniac” is von Trier’s sexual tantrum, a cinematic declaration against faithfulness. For von Trier, love means having to do things you don’t want to do at a given moment, whether it’s sleeping at home beside your spouse when a momentarily more enticing lover awaits or having Sunday dinner at the in-laws. Love means always having to say you’re sorry. And far from being sorry, he’s cavalierly indifferent. Along the way, he offers repellently racist words and gags along with a sophistical endorsement of them; a definition of a good Jew (wanna guess? “anti-Zionist”); a repudiation of therapy (old news chez von Trier); a revulsion at parenthood; and a generalized sense (rendered as a specific visual metaphor in Vol. II) that any attempt to defer or deflect immediate sexual gratification is a mortification that leads swiftly to a total monastic repudiation of life itself.

There’s a lot of sex shown in “Nymphomaniac,” but von Trier’s depiction of sex acts is blandly pneumatic, mechanical, virtually effortless, and filmed as casually and as indifferently as is the rest of the action. There’s no metaphysic, no mystery, no intricacy, no thrill to his sense of sex. The very notion of pleasure itself is one that escapes him. Contrast it with the sex scenes in “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” in which sex is work, sex is comedy, sex is an exhausting, consuming joy—and a mutual one, in which something of each other’s soulful essence is passed back and forth. (There’s even greater mystery and depth in Catherine Breillat’s films, notably “Romance” and “Sex Is Comedy,” which I’ll revisit soon.)

Actually, there is one sequence that von Trier films with care and passion. I’m writing allusively to avoid spoilers, but what’s already clear from the trailer is that, in Volume II, Joe gets involved in a physically masochistic relationship. That quest for punishment dangles, throughout Vol. I, as a shoe waiting to drop: Joe makes her initial appearance as beaten bloody and near-unconscious, and, as she speaks to Seligman in the movie’s first half, there’s no reference to what may have happened to her. But Vol. I offers a faux cliffhanger ending, regarding Joe’s quest for pleasure, which leaves it obvious that, in Vol. II, that quest will entail pain.

The masochistic relationship is what von Trier films with an almost palpable sense of excitement. What’s notable about those scenes is the way that they define the sadist (a man, called K, played by Jamie Bell) and leave his motives undefined. He, not Joe (now the adult, maternal Joe, played by Gainsbourg), is the focus of these scenes, and the meticulous practicality of his ministrations, as well as his overt, robust, nearly gleeful vigor in inflicting pain, is the sole focus of von Trier’s visual pleasure. Again, avoiding spoilers, let’s say that there are a number of scenes in the second volume in which Joe gets beaten bloody, always as a consequence of her sadly inextirpable feelings of love, and von Trier films those scenes with a verve, an excitement, a passion that’s missing from the rest of the movie. There’s nothing pornographic, nothing expressly stoking desire, in the film—with the exception of a few moments in these sadomasochistic scenes.

The core fantasy is of a woman who is man’s random source of pleasure and who, when she withholds herself from manhood at large because of her emotional bonds (or would take other action resulting from those bonds), von Trier sees fit to punish her for it, brutally. And the woman finds that punishment just and apt, not requiring redress of any sort. What’s more, von Trier covers his tracks with a flourish of feminist rhetoric to defend Joe’s and all women’s freedom—even as he defines that freedom strictly in his own terms of constant libertine availability and doesn’t grant women the freedom to pursue anything else, not as long as there are men in need.

Thanks to Seligman, von Trier’s repugnant fantasies are adorned with pseudo-intellectual frippery, a collection of random Wikipedia factoids from Roman history, art history, music history, religious history, political history, and a wink at pop-culture arcana as well. Seligman and Joe make a big psychophilosophical kerfuffle over eating rugelach with a cake fork and the choice of which hand’s nails to cut first, a secular-intellectual equivalent of seeing Jesus in the cake frosting.

It turns out that there is a tea stain on the wall—Joe has put it there, and Joe reads it. There’s also a moment when Seligman says that her story sounds like a movie, another one in which he calls an element of her tale utterly implausible and she responds by asking whether he finds it more meaningful if he challenged it or went along with it. Von Trier does reveal another aspect of his pleasure—the pleasure of storytelling. He is an irrepressible filmmaker whose creative energy has been diverted to a need to vent, a brilliant rhetorician who packages his rant in the terms that his art-house audience, finding transgression in the mere quantity of sex and seriousness in the overtly intellectual discussion, will snap up. Not for nothing does the movie run on the metaphor of fly fishing—of the crafted adornment that, by imitating life, fools fish into swallowing the hook.

Still: Christian Geisnaes