Mark Keresman, Bad Movie, May 2014

Nymphomaniac: Volume Two

Lars Von Trier has suffered for his art long enough – now it’s YOUR turn

    While enigmatic Danish director Lars Von Trier—notorious for making a royal ass of himself at Cannes when he said that Hitler wasn’t such a bad guy—meant for his epic Nymphomaniac to be seen in one sitting, the nearly four-hour film was broken into two parts for the American marketplace. To recap for those that did not see Volume One:

Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård) finds a beaten young woman named Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) in a courtyard near his home, takes her to his home—she refused his offer to call an ambulance—and nurses her back to health. She offers her life story to him, detailing her nymphomania—he listens intently and non-judgmentally, finding parallels/moments of significance relating parts of her story to mathematics, J.S. Bach, the history of Christianity, and fishing. We get to see Joe’s story in very graphic detail. Sounds like fun, huh? WRONG. This movie (if you take both editions as a single unit) is one of the most un-erotic films this writer has ever seen. While Volume One had its moments, Volume Two is joyless, preachy, more pretentious than Volume One, and utterly depressing. It makes the classic Midnight Cowboy—another story of people struggling with their sexuality—seem like a Three Stooges short by comparison. Either Von Trier is exorcising his personal demons or he’s expressing his unreserved, seething contempt for humanity, men in particular.

Joe resumes her tales, which Seligman pretentiously relates to—oh, all kinds of stuff. Seligman is a virtual walking library of information and history, as he can relate her tales of joyless sexual encounters to the Whore of Babylon, the Fibonacci sequence (don’t ask), and the differences between the Eastern and Western Church. Next to this guy, Gore Vidal is Joey Bishop.

We get to see Joe’s attempt at domesticity—she and Jerome (Shia LaBeouf) move in together and have a child. Never mind these characters have no visible chemistry—I wasn’t even convinced these two even liked each other much. Joe is defined entirely by her “condition”—we know next to nothing else about her.

Yet Joe is not satisfied with her sex life with Jerome, so he gives his blessing for her to seek satisfaction outside their relationship. Fair enough, but Joe has grown to crave S&M sessions with the mysterious professional dominant K (Jamie Bell, creepily excellent) to the point that she leaves her son at home alone (not a good thing).

Then things get, even for this movie, weird. Joe gets a job as a “debt collector,” one that uses her sexual experience to motivate those behind on their debts. How she gets this job is not really made clear, but the head of the agency is played by Willem Dafoe, who after a time suggests she get a “protégé,” a cute young lady P (Mia Goth) with a dysfunctional past with whom she develops a relationship that’s both motherly and sexual. Things get even stranger. Bad and odd stuff happens. Characters behave improbably out of character. [MAJOR SPOILER] The gentle, compassionate intellectual Seligman—an asexual virgin—tries to have sex with Joe, who just moments before decided to stop having sex forever. The screen goes blank—we hear a commotion and a gunshot. Was the kindly Seligman trying to rape her or simply initiate sex? We don’t know—Joe presumably has struck a blow for feminism (or something)—and Seligman is presumably dead. Is Von Trier saying that humans will give in to their baser desires eventually? That no good deed goes unpunished? Or that Seligman, like most men, deserved to die and Joe is finally in control of her sexuality? Your guess is as good as mine.

In addition to ICON, Mark Keresman is a contributing writer for SF Weekly, East Bay Express, Pittsburgh City Paper, Paste, Jazz Review, downBeat, and the Manhattan Resident.

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