Berlin Diary: Nymphomaniac punctures popular notions of love

Danish director Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac is a remarkable film. It explores an obsession of our times — sex — but with absolute dispassion and artistry. The film’s longer, unreleased cut of volume one of the two-part film premiered at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. While this part includes Shia LaBeouf, Uma Thurman, Stellan Skarsgaard and Christian Slater, the bigger stars appear in Volume 2 — Charlotte Gainsbourg, Willem Dafoe and Jamie Bell. The film’s palette is drained of colour and among the things that von Trier shows us are photographs of male genitalia that belong in a science textbook, complete with Post-it notes. The film is about Joe (newcomer Stacy Martin), whose bloodied body is found on the street by Seligman (Stellan Skarsgaard). Seligman takes her in and she recounts to him, in flashback, her sexual odyssey since she was a child. He listens by her bedside, with fascination and essentially non-judgmental interest. Their interaction helps rein in von Trier’s own cynical views on love and sex (“love is just base instincts wrapped up in lies”) and gives heft to his intellectual rigour (comparing the techniques of her sexual obsession to fly fishing, Proust and more). Above all, Nymphomaniac is leavened with humour —quite an accomplishment for von Trier, whose oeuvre is characterised by cynicism and melancholia along with provocation. When Joe relates her first sexual experience and the number of times a bike mechanic humped her — “three times from the front and five times from the back” — she remarks dryly that they were like Fibonacci numbers. As a teenager, she and her girlfriend compete on how many men they can screw on a train, to win a bag of chocolates. Later, she devours so many men, she plays a bored tic tac toe when returning phone calls, telling them it’s off. (Scott Foundas of Variety delightfully described the film as a “shagnum opus”). [caption id=“attachment_1395819” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Poster for Nymphomaniac.[/caption] The piece de resistance in Nymphomaniac, which has Uma Thurman playing a wife whose husband has dumped her for Joe, is both electrifying and hysterically funny. Thurman brings her three little kids to confront her husband and Joe, so that it can be useful for the kids later in therapy, as she puts it. For a French director, a ménage-a-trois scene would have been just another dinner scene, but von Trier is liberated from any pretence of civilized veneer, and Uma takes off on all eight cylinders. Martin puts in a bloodless but effective performance of a woman imprisoned by her desires. Skarsgaard has the air of an empathetic professor when hearing Joe’s sexual perversions. However, the director never explains why Joe is the way she is or offers any hint about her life beyond her sexual encounters. He distills her down to her sexual obsession and so her character does not emotionally haunt us as Emily Watson did in Breaking the Waves, for instance. All in all, the film is a terrific send-up and it punctures popular notions of love and sex, which are long overdue for deflation if you ask me. In dealing with obsessive female sexual desire, Nymphomaniac has a predecessor in Luis Bunuel’s 1967 landmark masterpiece Belle de Jour, in which a wealthy, married Catherine Deneuve secretly works in a brothel to fulfill her sexual fantasies. Watching her, we realise that rather than free will, it’s our emotional programming that influences our life decisions. Those expecting panting pornography from Nymphomaniac will be frustrated because the sex scenes, while intentionally provocative and shocking, are drained of erotic charge and devoid of satisfaction — for the protagonist at least. She does not seem to even feel joy at manipulating the men and making monkeys out of them in seconds. They just fulfill an obsessive need, that’s all. She could have been doing the laundry, for all the passion she brings to sex. Meenakshi Shedde is India Consultant to the Berlin and Dubai Film Festivals and curator to festivals worldwide. Her email is meenakshishedde@gmail.com