You’ve fucked thousands of men !

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2 March

This is a review of Nymphomaniac Vol. II (2013), and follows on from a review of Vol. I

A guess at Nymphomaniac Vol. II from @THEAGENTAPSLEY : does younger Joe's lack of affect suggest a Freudian father / daughter issue ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 1, 2014

In the catalogue of sexual possibilities*, Vol. II leaves an obvious one unexplored till late, and, even if it did not end as it does (its blackout over imagined action mirrors the opening), it would be hard to conceive (pun intended !) that a night of confession would lead to a radical resolve on Joe’s part, despite the alleged merits of a problem shared.

There are certainly plays that have us believe in the redemptive possibilities of talking till dawn or the like (and, equally, there is Chekhov and works such as Uncle Vanya), and enough of the dialogue even smacks of the stage (both now, between Joe and Seligman, and between Joe and others in her recollection) : whatever therapy goes on here, with what Joe calls Seligman’s digressions (and, as the review of Vol. I identifies in him, her accusing him of not listening), seems like Long Day’s Journey into Night.

The credits confirm that the films were shot in continental Europe, Nordrhein-Westfalen (in Germany) and in Belgium (Ghent ?), despite the ostentatious show of modern-day fivers, and the one-pound notes that ceased circulation in the early 1980s and their predecessors, whereas all that establishes the possibility of Britain is Stacy Martin’s RP way of being matter of fact as younger Joe, and Charlotte Gainsbourg’s very obviously British – if less class-ridden – tones.

Perhaps Lars von Trier seriously intends by these means to pass off other countries as the UK, but the whimsicality of the currency is matched by having Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård) see a conflagration that he does not know about or which Joe has yet to put in context : it is on the screen, and it is as if he reads it from Joe’s mind, just as he does when he decodes her secular transfiguration with The Whore of Babylon and the promiscuous wife of a Roman Emperor. Finding meanings, interpreting things, he seems to live in his head, whereas Joe, if not in her heart, then in her body and its sensations.

In fact, she seems to go to the opposite extreme from being bookish and knowing what everything is, and in her Martin incarnation especially sounds often not so much ironic, as maybe she is meant to be in a ‘cute’ sort of way, as vacuous. Yet in this film we are meant to believe that she is earning at a level where she can make a payment of £1,000 per month beyond the cost of living – or maybe that just sounded a good sum to von Trier, and he does not realize what her salary would have to be…

The film likes to run the gamut of filmic techniques, perhaps just in case we are getting stale, so stock footage of nature is used, which is just before the scene of levitation when Joe has her revelation, and another chapter is edgily hand-held, whereas the two-person scenes with Seligman and Joe have them occupy the space from all angles. Something that Joe says about the number of permutations of the leads of an eight-cylinder engine suggests that trying everything every way seems to be a drive that she shares with von Trier.

It certainly leads to films whose combined running time is a minute more than four hours, but it felt much longer than a night’s worth of narration** :

If @THEAGENTAPSLEY is not much mistaken, Vols I and II of @NymphomaniacUK need only have run to 3h 15mins, maybe just 3h...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 2, 2014

However long it ran, how was this film going to end, when all the talking was done ? With what might seem a cheap comment about what men really think about promiscuous women, not worthy of a typical man, let alone one of apparent education – and which then justified, after the fact, suspicions that all Seligman’s acceptance of Joe’s past actions had been insincere and for other reasons (and he, not Joe, is the predator with his lair and trap) ? What did that leave other than a shattered framing-device for a story of a woman who would say Fill my holes, but maybe had not much else to say, maybe was not always / ever telling the truth… ?

Cynically, if Seligman did not comprehend the nature of consensual sex and take what she said seriously, he had seemed as good a person as any to do so – or was the catharsis of just telling it all sufficient for this therapy to be of lasting value, despite the outcome ? Though the truth is that von Trier wanted to show us this, and chose the device of Joe telling it to Seligman (not her telling us) for its clear advantages, even at the risk of losing part of the audience (no doubt the less worthy part) for this second film.


Post-script

Lars von Trier thanks Andrei Tarkovsky in the credits : is this an acknowledgement, as seems to be the case, that the Bach work for organ that he uses was employed to such effect in Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice (1986) ?


End-notes

* Seen or mentioned are anal sex, masturbation, sadomasochism, lesbian sex, oral sex, double penetration, inter-racial sex, rape, dice sex, masturbating in public, and even intercourse.

** Apparently, the present films originate in response to an edit down to just 90 minutes.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

From my London case-book

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


28 February

This is a review of Nymphomaniac Vol. I (followed up with a review of Vol. II)

For a minute or two, the screen is dark, but with noises of what sounds like a railway, running water, a creak – which is what cinema is until we come to interpret it, the things with which we are presented and what they might mean. Will we even believe what we are shown, if someone is telling a story ?

Then, in what does not seem like an actual crooked alleyway, a woman lying (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and a man who has no reason to go there to find her (Stellan Skarsgård) : establishing that she does not intend to stay there, if he goes for help, a request for a cup of tea with milk leads directly to her propped up in bed, in his pyjamas, in a room with dingy, peeling wallpaper, almost out of place and time. (She gets tea, but without milk.)

As is what little we see of the exterior world, which is supposed to be Britain, but the interiors have a continental feel to them, and – even if the ticket-collector does have a British Railways badge – did trains ever seem so German in recent times ? These things aside, another bargain between Joe and Seligman, that she will explain why she thinks herself so bad, if he promises to listen to everything. A narrative that begins I discovered my cunt at the age of two is self-consciously a Freudian case-study, whatever else it might be.

In NYMPH()MANIAC, @KermodeMovie (http://t.co/EB0LlMKXwp) sees the parentheses only as a vulva, not a null set - who / what's worth nothing ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 4, 2014

The director may have tied Seligman into the bargain, but around two hours is only half the story, and does he risk half his audience not caring to come back for the rest ? So far, the mix includes resentment at an invited deflowering by an older boy, a game of conquests with a friend, an attempt to adhere to one-night stands, a little of The Dice Man thrown in for good measure, a monochrome sequence in a hospital unlike any that it seems to be supposed to resemble, and coincidences that have Seligman wondering whether the line that is being spun belongs, where we started, with The Compleat Angler.

Do we understand, or want to understand, the younger Joe (played by Stacy Martin) whom we see ? Are the increasing analogies that are being used, which twice pop up on the screen in big white letters the words Cantus firmus when Seligman is explaining how a work of Bach’s is put together, interposing layers of irritation, even if Joe thinks that it explains the parts to what she wants from three lovers ? In terms of the film, it is just taking time to display the three lovers separately, and together, in bands when, if it means anything to her, it is not a visual concept.

Amongst other things, the diagrams of streams, of layers of water within them, of the physics of parallel parking, and of the Fibonacci series and how succeeding terms are calculated, von Trier plants all these on the screen, but he would not need to, if his characters were adequately equipped to express themselves (or could be relied on)* ? Who Seligman is and what he has done, we do not know, but he tells Joe, a former medical student, about delirium tremens, as if she would not know, he likens her sex-games to angling – is this to avoid relating to what he is actually being told, as we would think, if someone did it to us, saying that it was just like x ?

Try as he might to be a sympathetic listener, always trying to find some ground for Joe to think better of herself than she does (or for him not to think badly of her), there is a clinicality that hangs over this film, which not even the gaspingly absurd nature of some of the recollected interchanges can dispel. One minute, never really having had proper duties working for Jerôme, Joe has lost it, the next we hear of work is that she somehow has a full-time job. An entertaining extended scene with Uma Thurman (Mrs H.), from which there is no going on, gives way to the one in the hospital, seemingly as much as a displacement as anything.

The way in which, at some level, Seligman is drawn in hints that whether, complete with diagrams, this is a shaggy-dog story or a fish on the hook he may regret taking care of this bruised stranger (it all looks pretty superficial, and there is no suggestion that she is caught by pain in all of this time - not at all consistent with what we will come to be shown has happened to her). Volume II alone will tell…

Is Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac Vol. I (2013) touched by Sartre (Huis Clos, perhaps) ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 1, 2014

End-notes

* Then again, he shows a Greek temple with its façade enclosed in a rectangle, but there is no explanation that the ratio between height and width is that, as the series develops, between successive terms, known as The Golden Section, which was considered most visually pleasing.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)