Pornography. It’s a chaste subject largely inviting scoffs and hushed whispers. Many seem to avoid it, but not Lars Von Trier (“Melancholia”) with his Tolstoy-esque length rumination on the act of sex in “Nymphomaniac: Volume 1.”
Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg, “Melancholia”), the ingenue for Von Trier’s dialectical surges on the nature of sex, is found battered and broken in an alley when the old bookish Seligman (Stellan Skarsgard, “The Avengers”) finds her and brings her back to his house. Joe then begins to recount the story of how she ended up in that alley that involves all sorts of strange encounters.
It’s here that Von Trier exerts his experience in the form and function in art house cinema on “Nymphomaniac” that sometimes urges comparisons to a satire. Joe announces that, from an early age, she discovered her sexuality and has always demanded more from sunsets; she’s cynical, desirous, shy and completely resolute. For all the rather graphic interludes, Von Trier’s film is one that never tires of its length; with its forays into discussions on Fibonacci numbers, musical triads and fly fishing.
When current day Joe flashes back to when she was a younger sort of maniac played by newcomer Stacey Martin, the young libertine finds herself fishing around trolley cars for conquests; Seligman interjects that this is akin to reading a river. This is all in the name of winning a bag of chocolate. Increasingly, Joe’s sexual interests veer into satanic and strange avenues.
However, while young Joe drifts from man to man, she doesn’t find pleasure in all of her sexual endeavors. It’s a philosophical conundrum that pedals around the issues of sex eventually trying to find some romantic agency in Joe’s mania. While Von Trier fishes for ways to make sex seem more and more grotesque, eventually desensitizing, it becomes meaningless. The erotic has become unerotic, commonplace and seemingly unappealing.
Martin brings a slender elegance to the role of young Joe – she’s occasionally brutish, starving, coquettish – and while Von Trier writes in stylistic elements to “Nymphomaniac” that adds humorous dash of digressive impotence. Though smashing scenes of sex with illustrative examples that make Joe’s exploits seem cerebral, but it’s still the dialogue between Seligman and middle-aged Joe that remains the most appealing aspect.
“Nymphomaniac” is well calibrated in its poise to shock, but this diminishes over time. It’s not a film about eroticism, it’s about Joe’s ability to endure despite focusing her energies on fetishes which are prone to self-immolation. Even when she’s focuses on her only love Jerome (played by with a horrid British accent Shia Labeouf, “Transformers”), her sexual jaunts simply turn into disasters.
Von Trier’s “Nymphomaniac: Volume 1” for all its gauzy, salacious material is occasionally fascinating, even in its most simplistic diversions on Kierkegaardian philosophy and rabble-rousing graphic sex. It’s just a shame that for all the outrageous antics that some aspects of the film are not as well tuned as others.
