Ever the tricky jokester, Lars Von Trier mixes it up in his two-part opus, Nymphomaniac. The grandiloquent literary and fly fishing allusions of Nymphomaniac Part One and its hand-in-hand farcical shadings yield in Part Two to a much more somber tone. Sadomasochism rises to the fore as soon as you can say 50 Shades of Grey. Accompanied by dark underpinnings of being tortured, then subsequently herself torturing and extorting, our heroine, Joe, faces a not inconsiderable identity crisis. Von Trier seems to be daring us to hang in there when Joe (a nicely nuanced Charlotte Gainsbourg) seeks out a nasty bondage maniac (Jamie Bell) to ostensibly help her find her missing orgasm. He’s one sick, flogging, dude, if that sort of thing interests you. Then her confessor Seligman (the usually excellent Stellan Skarsgard) snaps us back to more allusions. This time it’s the schism between the Eastern and Roman church and its symbolic struggle between celebration and guilt–if you can swallow that.
While Nymphomanaic Part One tries to be funny, Part Two achieves the uneasy feat of combining a smidgen of intentional funny with the far more common unintentionally funny. Then things quickly become downright glum. A scene seemingly straight from Von Trier’s Anti-Christ reappears when Joe abandons her baby in the middle of the night to go off to her therapy of whips and ropes, only to have the child’s father, Jerome (Shia LaBeouf), unexpectedly arrive home to find the kid venturing onto an open ledge. Not long after Joe is out on the street. A meeting with a bill collector from hell (Willem Dafoe) inspires her to apply her talent for knowing men’s sexual vulnerabilities to becoming a successful collection agent. That is until a highly ridiculous coincidence thwarts her momentum. Along the way she has recruited a 15-year-old apprentice, P (Mia Goth), who will make LaBeouf’s hot-and-cold act look mild by comparison. Part I of Nymphomaniac was merely pretentious around its edges. Part Two asks an arm and a leg’s worth of suspending our bullshit detector… And I usually highly admire the intermittently genius provocateur Von Trier (Breaking The Waves, Melancholia, Dancer In The Dark, Dogville).
Von Trier has promised five-and-a-half-hour director’s cut. I doubt I’ll seek further elucidation by sitting through all of this again. While there are moments of brilliance in each part of Nymphomaniac–in Part One, Uma Thurman’s powerful scene; In Part Two, Joe’s pair of African sex partners interrupting their coitus for an hilarious argument while she looks on–this is largely a disappointing affair. I wanted to root for Joe when she walks out of a 12-step program by telling off the whole insipid group, and proudly declaring herself not a sex addict at all but a nymphomaniac, but I equally sensed the likely tragic outcome awaiting her. Von Trier can be excellent in pushing his audience in paradoxically opposite directions simultaneously. Although digressive and manipulative,
Nymphomaniac Part 2 portrays an edgy portrayal of sex addiction and its human toll. Unfortunately it also reeks of a director’s vanity supplanting a more considered approach. No one is asking Nymphomaniac to be pretty. Or sexy. Just don’t bash us over the head with pitch-black (often boring) excess. It would have helped if the film’s ending was more than a cheap trick that will have you cursing (and laughing) as you head for the exit.