Skip to main content

Lars von Trier’s Sex Therapy: “Nymph( )maniac Vol. 1”

 
Uncle Lars is up to no good again.

I’d caught wind of Von Trier’s latest sex-heavy project as far back as early 2012. Even then, without having read a thing about its plot, I knew it’s to be something explosive. The title of course speaks volumes, but in the hands of the Danish nut-job, you just know you’ll be in for a cracking good trip.

And then there’s the cast: Charlotte Gainsbourg (who’s known for having pulled off some sick stuff in Von Trier’s Anti-Christ), Willem Dafoe, Christian Slater, Stellan Skarsgard, Jamie Bell (oh cripes, there goes Billy Elliot), Uma Thurman, and last but not at all the very least, the infamous head-case that’s Shia I-plagiarise-my-apologies LaBeouf. So there you have it: every single one of them talented individuals, regardless of your opinions of them. What in the world are they doing jumping into bed with Uncle Lars?

You just don’t say no to Uncle Lars when he comes a-knocking. This is the devil-in-disguise who brought us scathing social critiques such as Dancer in the Dark (anyone who manages to get Björk and Catherine Deneuve into the same movie and make them do some crazy dance together is a GENIUS in my book) and Dogville (oh Nicole Kidman, if only you’d stick to arthouse). Uncle Lars doesn’t go light. When he has a point to make, he uses a wrecking ball (but not the lame way Miley Talentless uses it) and brings down the house.

Nymph()maniac Vol. 1 is about sex. Duh. But it doesn’t deal with sex the way you think it should. Its approach is, yes, graphic to the point of XXX (Shia LaBeouf seems to enjoy it), but anyone who thinks that’s what gets Uncle Lars off is missing the point. What gets Uncle Lars' juices flowing is in fact the main narrator Joe’s (Gainsbourg) interior landscape. Her retelling of the nymphomaniac episodes has a Proustian whiff about it: literate, multi-layered, shadowy, metaphor-laden. There’s the prevalent use of analogies, which may seem irrelevant at first, but take on a dark significance as she begins to wrap up a “chapter.”

The film is structured like an episodic novel, clearly marked with chapter titles. When the viewer enters a particular chapter, he enters a world with a distinctive mood and colour. The chapter “Mrs H,” for instance, is sadistically comical, thanks to a jaw-dropping turn by Uma Thurman, while “Delirium,” filmed entirely in black and white, returns our narrator to her father’s deathbed, and is heartbreaking and disconcerting in its frank portrayal of physical degeneration. Vol. 1 is two hours long, but feels half of that. You leave each “chapter” bewildered. You hunger for more, hoping that what comes next will illuminate the enigma that is Joe.

When the film ended, I sat there with my mouth half-open, wondering if I’d just seen Von Trier’s best work. But I’d had that feeling before with his previous efforts, and I’m sure, as Ol’ Blue Eyes was fond of saying, the best is yet to come.

My cinema companion and I are subjecting ourselves to the temptation of Vol. 2 next week.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Comments are always appreciated! Do feel free to leave them or start a discussion.

Popular posts from this blog

What is Freedom?: Jean-Paul Sartre’s “The Age of Reason” (Part 1)

The first instalment of Jean-Paul Sartre’s trilogy Roads to Freedom , The Age of Reason ( L’ Â ge de Raison , 1945), compels the modern reader to re-define the idea of freedom, conventionally worded as “the condition of being free of restraints” (The Free Dictionary). “Free of restraints” is murky waters when it comes to Mathieu and Daniel, the two main characters of Sartre’s soul-searching work.  Sartre’s characters are primarily “for-itself beings,” existentially free persons who act according to the choices that have moulded them. The words “existentially free” are oxymoronic, and the phrase “free persons who act according to the choices that have moulded them” is painfully paradoxical. This is classic Sartrean paradox: it tells you that as an individual you are “free” to make choices, but these choices are pre-determined by a whole other set of choices beyond your control or manipulation. Mathieu Delarue has made the mistake of impregnating his mistress of seven ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Approaching Haruki Murakami’s “Kafka on the Shore” the Jungian Way

“The world of gods and spirits is truly nothing but the collective unconscious inside me.” – Carl Jung, On the Tibetan Book of the Dead What appears to be supernatural and surrealistic in Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore  does not have to remain that way once we accept that in Murakami’s fictional world, the natural and the supernatural often cross paths and become one single unity. In the previous three entries on the novel, I have extensively discussed its relation to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex . But here I intend to explain why the supernatural should in fact be deemed natural, and how this reasoning is a direct reference to the theories of Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung and German philosopher G.W. F. Hegel, both of whom are mentioned in the novel. Carl Jung’s psychological theory on the “collective unconscious” (the notion positing that all humans – regardless of race and culture – share a psyche containing “latent predispositions towards identical reactions” [1...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Sound of Alienation: Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Voices”

In the nine “Voices” poems (“Die Stemmen,” 1902), we find Rilke speaking out for those who have suffered pain and injustice. He insists that in order for them to be heard, they need to “advertise” themselves, and this should be done through singing, or songs – like the castrati (referred to as “these cut ones”) who sing to God and compel him to stay and listen. This message is found in the “Title Leaf” – an introduction of sorts to the nine songs. It is tempting to read the nine songs (“Beggar’s,” “Blind Man’s,” “Drunkard’s,” “Suicide’s,” “Widow’s,” “Idiot’s,” “Orphan Girl’s,” “Dwarf’s,” “Leper’s”) as a collection of poetic pleas for social awareness. This is due to Rilke’s “casting choices”; he has selected society’s most conspicuous outcasts as the main speakers of his poems. When, for instance, the beggar in “The Beggar’s Song” says, “I go always from door to door/rain-soaked and sun-scorched,” we are induced to sympathise with his downtrodden fate. The same can be said for...
Post a Comment
Read more