"That empathy you claim is a lie because all you are is society's morality police, whose duty is to erase my obscenity from the surface of the Earth, so that the bourgeoisie won't feel sick"
Words to live by! This is a hell of a fearless film, unafraid to be disliked, but disliked on its own terms not on those that get imposed on it. Which makes it a little difficult to criticise without feeling self-conscious! Even the running time of the films, especially in the director's cut version, feels as if it is setting out its thesis methodically and as straightforwardly as possible (time jumps notwithstanding) in order to remove any chance of misinterpretation, except for the misinterpretation that comes about through conscious choice.
I must admit though I did hope that during the film that Joe would paraphrase Cartman from South Park and throw out a rather weary one liner like "Why is it that everything today has involved something either going into, or coming out of, my vagina?!?"
This feels like an enormous mix of both external and internal influences. Externally there is the Tarkovsky one (the Bach, the Rublev icon, the nature walks), a quick seeming nod to Pasolini (in Seligman having read "The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, The Thousand and One Nights"), a bit of Antonioni (those L'Avventura-esque shots of women in the streets suddenly attracting a crowd of men), the Thomas Mann and Death In Venice discussion, and maybe even a little of Darren Aronofsky's Pi (in the numerology and Fibonacci spiral discussion). There is Greenaway all over this film too + Gaspar Noe bringing up the rear. Also the oral sex on the train scene feels like an explicit reference to In The Realm of the Senses, not just in the act but in the way that it is about stealing a man's orgasm that he was going to give to his wife (modernising the scene to be about the man saving it up for his wife to be at her most fertile in order to maximise the potential for a baby: the first of many potential new lives that Joe puts a firm stop to!), and delightedly/triumphantly showing him the evidence of the same.
There are two references that I think are most key to the framing scenes of Joe and Seligman in the bedroom though. The first would seem to be Bergman but more specifically the film that Liv Ullmann directed from a Bergman script called
Faithless, which is told entirely in flashback in a writer's study by a woman from his past/a ghost/a purely fictional creation as they wrestle over the direction of a story of adultery. But also there is a hefty dose of The Usual Suspects in Nymph()maniac's framing scenes too, especially with the sense that Joe is using the objects in the room as a kind of aide-mémoire.
Those framing scenes feel as if they are about a single track mind opposed against a free associative one. Joe is continually creating a long form 'this happened, then that' narrative, but Seligman is continually stymying that with interjections. The interjections at first seem helpful, as if throwing in extra helpful context or teasing out further details, but the further we get in the first film and especially in the second film (which almost opens straight away with Joe challenging Seligman on whether he's been listening at all), it just seems about Seligman continually unsuccessfully trying to change the subject. This comes to a head in the DIY abortion scene in which Seligman talks about people not wanting to know every little detail of the procedure. Who is telling this story anyway? The author or the critic? And what "other people"? They are the only two characters there. This fourth wall breaking moment occurs almost around the same time that we get the reflection of the camera crew in the mirror. Seligman is inescapably 'society's morality police' for this tale, and is just as suspiciously self-centred as the other authority figures in the film, even before the inevitable final scene that makes that connection upsettingly explicit.
The way that Seligman is always rationally misinterpreting each key scene in Joe's story, calmly confident in having successfully figured out her rationale for every action that she has taken becomes extremely aggravating by the second film, and perfectly played to be so! I sympathised far more with Joe, especially in the later scenes, and laughed out loud at her deadpan, matter of fact line after the mountaineering rope monologue that: "I think this was one of your weakest digressions"!
I particularly like that Joe only really seems self critical in the framing scenes. In the action itself (especially when Stacy Martin is playing younger Joe, at an even further remove. I actually liked the way that multiple actors playing the same character at different ages in some ways split an individual into discreet lumps of experiences. The younger versions ghostly images of past lives, the newer ones darker echoes. No bridging the gaps between them to get back to the person they once were) Joe feels more like a force of nature, driven by urges without thinking about the meaning or message behind them too much. That itself is part of what makes Joe's intellectualising in the framing scenes ring rather hollow too, and I was left wondering if Seligman was another guy to be extorted and this was just the way that Joe found to arouse an ostensibly asexual man, through similarly intellectualising sex to the point where he couldn't help but become excited by it, despite his best efforts to repress it.
Anyway onto the story itself:
Volume I
There's almost an Anaïs Nin quality to the attempt to encapsulate a character's entire sexual history in one film, it feels both distanced and aloof from events yet also dedicated to arousing as well. Though the early childhood and adolescence sections reminded me of
The Sexual Life of the Belgians 1950-1978. I wonder if this epic recounting of a character's entire life history is a response to previous characters in von Trier's films seeming not to have had much of a background, instead almost being created just for the events of the film and presenting us with someone who is in the midst of their crisis. I've been guilty of this in previous posts on the forum in suggesting that perhaps a wider context of a character's life would in some ways help to 'explain' their psychology (such as knowing whether the crises that Bess in Breaking The Waves or Justine in Melancholia face were the first time that such things had happened, or if they had been building up for a while). Perhaps Nymph()maniac shows that there sometimes is no 'explanatory' context to a character's actions, and it is barking up the wrong tree to try and create one that might not be there.
Volume I contains all of the context to explain the issues the character is going to be facing in the next film. It is perhaps not as exciting a film as the second one, but it contains a number of the key moments, even if they get drawn out a little too much, such as Christian Slater's death scene as Joe's father. Although that shows just how crucial a figure he was in her life.
On that note, I was really nervous about the relationship Joe and her father were going to have, especially in the hospital. I was a little concerned throughout that it was going to go into a much more transgressive area of perhaps Joe committing incest and having sex with her mentally deteriorating father. Instead much to my relief Joe went off into the (Kingdom?) hospital basement to find someone to have a quickie with instead (I was left imagining what would have happened if Joe and the porter got caught in that motion sensitive room from The Kingdom in the middle of the act! Would they have had to hold the position until someone came in, the same way that Stig Helmer had to keep hold of the overflowing coffee cup in the TV series?!). I sort of think that this was the most revealing moment in the film - the moment that shows, for all of its 'transgressive sex', that Lars von Trier is just a big softy at heart. Though the relationship between Joe and her father ends in a harrowing manner, there are still boundaries that are not crossed there to allow their relationship to remain 'pure', perhaps the only relationship with a man in her life that isn't about sex, other than Seligman (which makes Seligman's final betrayal an important counterpoint), and arguably K (who isn't interested in conventional sex). In some ways I think this illustrates the difference between Lars von Trier and a director like Gaspar Noe - Noe wouldn't have missed an opportunity like that, even if it destroyed any thesis that his film might be building in the process!
This first film reminded me a little of Wise Blood in the sense that the pro-sex, anti-love stance of Joe is perhaps tellingly illustrating the deep fascination with, and fear of, an actual relationship. That final scene of horror is perhaps showing what happens when someone has put all of their feelings of unrequited love into one person. Perhaps it is better for that love to have always been unrequited and disappeared from your life altogether rather than for your lover to suddenly return and prove himself to be not discernably different (or better enough to promote monogamy at least) from any other partner?
I loved the final chapter of the first film with the Bach and screen split into lover with different temperments. It adds a kind of religious epiphany quality to the triptych, with the central panel of Jerome supposed to be the key one which the others are there to emphasise through their support and contrast with. But Jerome suddenly proves himself to be unable to carry that weight of expectation, which makes for the amazing climax of existential despair.
Volume II
Or, loving the executioner
In a way the first half of this volume feels as if it is re-playing themes from von Trier's other films. The attempt to kickstart a dysfunctional sexual relationship through 'putting yourself out there' promiscuity comes from Breaking The Waves. The child on the balcony comes from Antichrist (though I like to think it shows that not all children are stupid enough to hurl themselves from the nearest balcony as soon as the opportunity presents itself!), and the knotting of the cat o'nine tails which inspires the discussion of the number of twists to a knot used in executions seems to be alluding to Dancer In The Dark.
This is where the drama starts to happen. Even the framing scenes become more dramatic with the discussions spinning off into politically charged areas. I have to say that Joe gives a pretty good defence of free speech being about being allowed to make controversial statements, and the cowardice of modern society, which are all obviously thinly veiled (and highly amusing!) allusions to the Cannes controversy surrounding the Melancholia press conference. Though these speeches obviously range wider than that and act as a scathing indictment of societal hypocrisy itself.
The second film feels like the more adult take on Fifty Shades of Grey. The sadomasochism here doesn't pull its punches and is pretty tough but also surprisingly tender too. It also contains perhaps the best Yellow Pages telephone book product placement shot since those
J.R. Hartley adverts! Joe and K feel like kindred spirits, both approaching love only on their own terms. I love the way that Joe eventually shows that she's got what she has needed from her appointments with her second coming and takes control of her experiences again in the last scene in the room, laying the equipment out and assuming the position without needing to be told. But that means it is the end of the relationship, even before she makes an emotional grab for K's crotch! For which she takes more whiplashes than Jesus!
There are a few really nice matching pairs of scenes here. The masochistic dungeon with K's teacher setting homework and practical projects contrasts with the nymphomaniac ("we prefer the term sex addict") therapy session. Then the sex addict therapy session itself parallels with L's criminal business ("Extortion?" "I prefer the term debt collector"). I also love that the masochism experiences come into play both during the extortion work but also in the final scene in which Joe is beaten in the Irreversible-esque alley, where she doesn't cry out in pain at all to give her aggressor the pleasure.
(By the way I love the design of that alley. It really is like the tunnel in Irreversible in that it is a heightened run-down location that looks gloriously disturbing. Like an obviously stagebound set ready for a porno shoot. I think my favourite moment of the film has to be the opening five minutes or so of the first film which starts in blackness (one of three important scenes in complete blackness) with a developing soundscape overlaid, and then we get a number of shots prowling and exploring details of the location before the pull back reveal and Rammstein blasting out!)
The film takes a brilliantly militant turn again after Jerome is disposed of and we get the reclaiming of sex as within and a part of the individual rather than something imposed from without by society mores. The DIY abortion scene is the unambiguous self-imposed statement of rejection of any impositions onto Joe, but while Seligman might recognise that Joe is no different to a man who loves and leaves, he's not grasping that Joe is wrestling with issues around being a parent (In all of these conversations Seligman keeps almost understanding the situation yet then goes on to add an extra comment that strikes a completely false note and wrecks any sense of complicity or understanding between the pair). It is the ultimate irony that Joe ends up being forced into a surrogate parental role by L, grooming a teenage successor and then ending up having a sexual relationship with the girl too (despite the both understandable and literal but also almost Freudian protestations by Joe: "No, please. I have a wound. I have a wound"), another way that this relationship is failing the test of being non-sexual, like Joe's father. Of course that all ends in sexual betrayal and violent confrontation as the gun that was introduced earlier in the film inevitably has to be fired at least once.
While this is a film about endless amounts of sexual partners, it seems key to the film that Jerome is the bookender - he takes Joe's virginity with his mathematically precise thrusting, and does the same to the younger protegee that Joe has been training before finally beating Joe senseless (and into asexuality?). In the interim she dotes over him (and does things wrong in order to be punished as a way of getting attention, which subliminally prepares us for the BDSM later) only to be abandoned, then Joe's unrequited love reverie is shattered by his reappearance and he destroys her notions of love yet again, and eventually Joe's final turn to asexuality is driven by being replaced in his affections by a younger protegee. Jerome is the primary male sexual partner here, and he's a complete bastard. It really suggests that Joe doted over the wrong man (as also suggested by seemingly falling in love with, or at least desperately grabbing for, K), and that was her biggest tragedy, because falling in love with Jerome ended up reinforcing her own philosophy of life. I guess there could be a critique of the film as not being a particularly feminist one, in the sense that Joe really does end up being defined by the men in her life. At least in the story that she tells to Steligman.
The film seems to reach a dark point of exterminating all notions of sexuality as the only true liberation. Its a deeply unerotic film in that sense. Perhaps Joe is the true asexual of the film in that she has moved definitively beyond the bounds of sexuality. Has tried them all and found them wanting. She even finds the power to reject in the final moments, running out like a spirit off into the night, the sound of the cat flap ringing in the audience's ears, louder than the gunshot.
You might also like to know that throughout this review we've also had a naked asexual man up a stick, watching some pornography. Have you reached any conclusions?
Man: *shakes head*
