The weird world of Lars von Trier

LARS VON TRIER’S film may be called “Nymphomaniac”, but the controversial Danish film director insists that he wants only to stimulate the viewer’s brain. His latest opus, chopped into two separate two-hour “volumes” for its British release later this month, opens with an ageing bachelor, Seligman (Stellan Skarsgard), finding a badly beaten woman named Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) in an alleyway. He takes her back to his dingy flat, where she proceeds to recount her teeming sexual history in high-flown literary language. A series of flashbacks, each assigned its own chapter heading, shows the young Joe pouncing on strangers in railway carriages, and then as a married mother escaping domesticity by means of anonymous bondage sessions and hotel-room threesomes.

The numerous graphic sex scenes, performed by body doubles from the adult-film industry, have been widely publicised. But if pornography is the most basic kind of film-making, “Nymphomaniac” is the opposite. Mr von Trier overlays Joe’s reminiscences with captions and diagrams, intercutting them with documentary clips, switching between monochrome and colour and regularly shifting genre from bedroom farce to family tragedy and crime thriller.

He also keeps interrupting Joe’s story so that she and Seligman can debate the ethics of a life devoted to carnality, and so that Seligman can flaunt his erudition. The joke is that there is no variety of debauchery that this monkish academic cannot compare to fly-fishing, the Russian revolution, Bach’s polyphony or Edgar Allan Poe’s delirium tremens.

It is hard to think of another director who would have attempted such an arch, philosophical and formally restless film about sex, but it is ultimately bleak. During even the most intimate intercourse—whether physical or verbal—neither participant is capable of moving beyond their own personal preoccupations. Joe relates to other people via coitus, and Seligman through books, but both of them remain quite alone.