Nymphomaniac (V2)

No more wounds

Read my writeup of Nymphomaniac: Volume I here.

The second film (or rather, the second half of one long film) in Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac duology, sees the exeunt of Stacy Martin as the young version of Joe, which means we get to see Charlotte Gainsbourg do more than sit in a poorly lit room.  What the film unfortunately does, however, is remind us that it’s made by a cynical filmmaker who loves to smash sandcastles after hours of careful building.  I never thought he could do worse than his slow-burning and nightmarish destruction of Earth in Melancholia, but at least that film did not operate under the pretense that things might end up okay.

From the start of Volume II, things I picked at in the first volume begin to make sense.  Joe becomes tired, much as I did, of Seligman’s constant allegorical digressions, but soon realizes that it’s because he cannot relate to the content of her stories.  He reveals that he’s a virgin and considers himself asexual, which makes him the perfect audience for her chronicle.  He recognizes some serious iconography in the story of her first orgasm – apparently, when she was twelve and on a field trip, she spontaneously levitated and had a vision of Valeria Messalina and Babylon the Great (two promiscuous mythological figures with rather sexist story trajectories, even by Christian standards).  This is important because Joe went through life assuming that these were separate versions of the Virgin Mary judging her for her transgressions, but they actually represented the great schism of the Church, after which the Orthodox (Eastern) side focused on redemption, while the Western church became obsessed with suffering.  What a motif.  “The concept of religion is interesting,” he says, “just as the concept of sex is interesting.  But you won’t find me on my knees in regards to either.”

Such indulgent dialogue is fine when it’s so delicious.  But the question of whether von Trier’s synthetic framing devices for the film mean something, or leastways whether we’re supposed to take them seriously, is soon answered.  Yes, dummy, he seems to tell us.  Don’t you remember who I am?  I made Antichrist! Seligman, in a broad commentary on epic storytelling, uses his own personal experience (texts, mathematics, etc.) to form an understanding of the story, just as an audience to anything would.  But as it should be, that’s without bringing his own opinion into it: he makes himself an impartial witness by claiming to be Joe’s inverse.  As such, he continues to play the part of observer and listener, and when he stops protesting the aforementioned “preposterous coincidences” in Joe’s story, that means we’re supposed to stop too.  But when von Trier introduces such an obvious plot device as Chekhov’s Gun, everything we thought we were onboard for becomes exasperating.

Where the first film is about character depth, this one is more about plot and overt themes.  So much so that summing up its events is reasonably easy: After Joe’s enjoyment of sex vanishes, she still hungers for it.  She and Jerôme (Shia LaBeouf) accidentally conceive a child together, and after three years, Joe’s frustration has become so great and her sexual demands so high that Jerôme suggests she sleep with other people to satisfy her mood (while of course remaining a family with him and their son, because that usually works out).  Her exploration becomes increasingly violent, culminating in her visiting K, a menacing (not a word I thought I’d ever use to describe Jamie Bell) sadomasochist who viciously abuses women who volunteer, but never has sex with any of them.  Joe asks what he gets out of it.  He says it’s none of her business.  Convenient for not having to make him a real character – on that note, why doesn’t Seligman ask Joe why she uses the letters of the alphabet in the place of the real names of everyone but Jerôme?  We even get his surname, which we don’t even get for Joe.

Joe loses her family after prioritizing her visits to K over taking care of her son, and her employer demands that she seek counseling under penalty of losing her job.  There’s a bit of narrative whiplash here in terms of how we’re meant to view Joe: in Volume I, we never saw her as someone who needed to “get better,” or someone that we were supposed to “take care of.”  Now, we see her admit that she has a sickness.  The psychologist (Caroline Goodall) tells her to remove anything from her life that reminds her of sex.  In the next shot, her apartment is completely empty, and her mirror painted over.  Thankfully, she soon lambastes the therapy group, claiming that she loves herself and that she’s not like the rest of them, who have used sex to fill some hole (a word that gets deliberately repeated throughout both films) in their lives.  The next image, beneath a rocking Talking Heads soundtrack, shows Joe tossing a Molotov cocktail at a parked car and walking away like an apathetic action hero.  Did this really happen?  Seligman stops the story.  “Wait,” he says.  “I didn’t get that part.”

Joe backpedals.  She becomes an enforcer for a debt collector named L (Willem Dafoe), who respects her “qualifications” (i.e. she understands the desires of men, and knows how to hurt people).  Okay.  We get it.  Natural empathy is nonexistent to Joe.  But now we get a narrative manifestation of a theme, and in a story about a character, it’s too jarring.  Then we remember von Trier’s obsession with self-loathing, and that his films’ examinations of paranoia and depression carry an unequivocal undercurrent of cynicism.  Suddenly, in a film we can’t imagine an ending for, things don’t seem so rosy.  L suggests that Joe find a “successor,” and recommends P (Mia Goth), a fifteen year-old daughter of criminals.  The girl moves in with Joe, and their relationship soon grows, as it must, into a sexual one.  But where Volume I would have seen Seligman asking Joe if she knew she was interested in women (i.e. deepening her character), Volume II sticks to forward action.  P wants to work in debt collection too, so Joe brings her to work.  Finally, the Law of the Inevitable Coincidence takes over, and it’s particularly sad because we know it’s coming: one of the men Joe must extort is Jerôme (now played by Michaël Pas, which is off-putting after seeing LaBeouf in the role for 3+ hours).  What follows, which includes P’s betrayal of Joe, makes little sense because we haven’t gotten to know her very well, and ends where the first film begins: with Joe lying in the alleyway after a beating from the two people she actually has feelings for (and notice what P does to her in this scene.  “P.”  Get it? Hardy har, Lars).

Joe has never looked at the whole story like this before.  Look what she has in front of her: all of the most important parts of her life, compartmentalized in some truly dazzling (and above all, logical) ways.  There’s some sort of epiphany, maybe.  She wants to be who she is while pruning the parts of her that make happiness impossible.  She remembers seeing a lone, deformed tree at the top of a mountain.  We remember her father (Christian Slater) and his allegory about the lone, beautiful ash tree.  How the souls of trees look like the souls of people.  We remember Yggdrasil.  This really could end gently and nicely (not “happily,” mind you).

But then we remember something we forgot: it’s Lars von Trier.  The final thirty seconds of the film, while not undoing absolutely everything that came before, bring cynicism to the surface.  It’s pretty revolting, albeit awarding Joe with the agency she’s never had.  All at once, Seligman’s various “misunderstandings” about Joe’s story become the manifestation of horror that lurks in all of von Trier’s films, and in a much more personal way than a rogue planet bashing into Earth (although, in its actual physical movement, it is a bit like that).  We are reminded of Selma’s execution in Dancer in the Dark, of the destruction of Dogville at the hands of Nicole Kidman and James Caan.  None of those hurt quite like this.

Nymphomaniac is a fascinating character study, which is why the plot-centric nature of Volume II’s latter parts is so difficult.  The rare interruptions now come as reliefs rather than annoyances, even as Joe begins to point out that Seligman is beginning to jump the shark with his digressions.  The nonsensical parts of the story increase, and are pointed out less often, then eventually not at all.  For example, why would Willem Dafoe’s character seek Joe out?  Why would he care if she obtained an apprentice?  Why would he recommend this particular disturbed teenager?  How has Joe “heard of” K?  Why does he take her in after being so sure that S&M is “not for [her]”?  Why does Marcel (Joe’s son) completely disappear?  Why has Joe read all of Ian Fleming, but never heard of Poe (though it’s notable that James Bond, a character she idolizes, is a sex addict in the novels)?  The answer is the House of Cards Plot.  It all happens because it has to in order for the plot to reach a convenient point.  In this case, it works if the journey was all worth it.  I guess I’m still unsure whether von Trier is haranguing Joe or rooting for her.  Let me say this another way: if the writer is indifferent about the character, none of it means anything.  Maybe it doesn’t matter where Joe goes from here.  Just that she got to this point.

I could have watched a third volume if the ending of this one allowed for it, but similar to Joe when the tiny blot of sunlight outside the apartment signifies dawn, I am exhausted, and I have to be done.

Nymphomaniac: Volume II (2014); written and directed by Lars von Trier; starring Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgård, Stacy Martin, and Mia Goth. 

 

Nymphomaniac (V1)

House of Usher, House of Cards

There’s a meta layer to Nymphomaniac in which director Lars von Trier allows character Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård) to comment on the nature of the film’s narrative.  He complains that a story being told to him by Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg), which makes up the entire film, is full of preposterous coincidences.  She replies by implying that he’ll get more out of it if he simply believes in it.  Is von Trier, mischievous as he is, commenting on the concept of stories and storytelling in general, on the idea that nonfiction is a weave of lies and truths just as love, as Joe tells us, is nothing more than “lust with jealousy added?”  Or is this an unfortunate cop-out, wherein the filmmaker tells us he’s going to show us what he wants to, and our choices are to either enjoy/learn from it or have a bad time?  You don’t necessarily have to choose one while watching the film, but shortly into it, you do have to accept that the parts of Joe’s herstory that are most heavily featured (and more so the parts that are skipped) are chosen with almost no justification by Joe (and by extension, von Trier), and that the film’s most preposterous coincidences are not the things that happen in Joe’s stagy, melodramatic tale, but the ways in which she and Seligman segue into them, the unlikely-to-the-point-of-absurdity observations that trigger the transitions.

The film opens as Seligman, a polite bachelor, finds Joe unconscious and badly beaten in the street.  He takes her in when she refuses an ambulance (your first House of Cards moment), gives her a blanket and something to drink, and asks how she ended up in this situation.  She claims that it’s her fault because she’s a terrible human being.  But there’s an ostentatious quality to this statement.  Joe wants Seligman to ask, as von Trier wants of his audience, what she means so that he (and we) can prove her wrong.  She says she’ll need to start at the beginning, and promises that it will be long (to be precise, four hours and two films).

She starts with her fascination with sex, and how it began when she was two years old.  This comes as no surprise, but only because of the film’s title.  If it were called something else, say, “Joe’s Story,” would this really feel like an organic way to begin?  Would Joe believe that a middle-aged stranger is automatically interested in her lifelong sexual escapades?  Maybe she sees an opportunity to work through something.  Or maybe this is just what von Trier is interested in about her.

First, she’s certain she’ll convince him of how bad a person she is when she relates a story of how, as a teenager (now played by Stacy Martin), she and a friend referred to as “B” (Sophie Kennedy Clark) dressed as hookers and had a contest to see how many male train passengers they could seduce in a single night.  The prize was a bag of candy, so of course, it wasn’t about the prize.  At least not for Joe, who engages in these sexual encounters with absolutely no joy.  So what is she after?  She’s a self-diagnosed addict, so I’m not asking about the past.  What is she trying to achieve by relating these stories?  Is there actually anything to discover?  Seligman, a conveniently well-read man with a wide net of interests and knowledge, tells her that nothing on the train was her fault, because one cannot blame an addict (even after she sexually assaults a married man – it’s interesting to observe that she has such power over a man twice her size and more than twice her age).  The numbers three and five keep coming up in her supposedly unrelated side-stories, and Seligman recognizes them as Fibonacci numbers.

Here’s what I mean about the transitions.  The Fibonacci thing, okay, it’s in Seligman’s nature (as a loner and a thinker) to make these connections, to dig previously undiscovered meaning out of stories and literature.  But the challenge on our part is whether any of these connections actually mean anything in the context of the story we’re witnessing.  Joe remembers the train story after noticing a colorful fishing lure hanging on Seligman’s wall.  He’s not much of a fisherman, but knows a lot about it, and once caught a big fish with that very lure.  Fishing imagery intermittently pops up during the scenes of young Joe and B luring men to them.  Not only that, but present-day Joe and Seligman’s voiceovers explain the imagery to us.  Aesthetically, it’s fun, but we actually don’t need any of it in order to create this metaphor for ourselves: young girls in skimpy outfits are essentially fishing lures for men, who are essentially dumb fish.  Later, Seligman brings her a plate of rugelach (a Jewish pastry), and happens to serve it with a cake fork.  Lo and behold, Joe used to know someone who ate rugelach with a cake fork, and she has very strong feelings on the “unmanliness” of the practice.  This brings her to one of the most significant characters in the story, Jerôme (Shia LaBeouf), who helps her lose her virginity, and then appears at increasingly unlikely points in the story – he just so happens to be interim boss at her first job and hires her on the spot, and then happens to be present when Joe finds a torn-up photograph of him in a random park.  Here’s the thing about Jerôme: he’s the only guy she does not indulge herself with as a young adult, which makes him the single important man in her story (aside from her father, played by Christian Slater, whom I’ll get to).

Another transition: Joe notices that Seligman has been reading (or rather, “re-acquainting [himself] with”) Edgar Allan Poe.  Joe has never heard of Poe, and Seligman’s chosen detail about the writer is that he died of severe delirium after attempting to tear himself away from his own addiction (in Poe’s case, alcoholism).  This reminds Joe of her father, who died of cancer, but experienced delirium in his final days, shouting for his wife, flopping around on the floor of the hospital (not unlike a fish) until the point of being straitjacketed, and so on.  Again, it makes sense for Seligman to make this connection with what he has, but the fact that the book happened to be sitting in plain view of this exact person, who he didn’t know would be there, is more than a little tough to believe, not because the film’s thematic stuff is too heightened or because I don’t believe such an encounter could happen, but because of how complex it is, and how reliant on these themes the film’s story is (and von Trier makes sure to have Joe and Seligman explain them until you get it – another example involves Joe going on long walks, intercut with images of a lion pacing in a cage, only to then have Joe state in a voiceover, “I was like an animal in a cage”).

Wait.  Joe has never heard of Edgar Allan Poe?  For all her knowledge of mythology, religion, sport, numbers, she hasn’t heard of the inventor of detective fiction, one of the first well-known people to try to write literature full-time, the guy who gets over-quoted and over-reported-on ad infinitum?  House of Cards again – she doesn’t know him because if she does, then the next important part of the film can’t happen, even if it defies all logic.  Remove one card, the house collapses.  But she’s got a lot more in common with Poe than she thinks, besides their rhyming names.  Seligman doesn’t mention it, but curious/careful viewers and readers may remember that shortly before Poe died, he was found barely conscious in the street, and incoherent about how he ended up in such a situation.

Volume 1, the halfway point, ends with a revelation about Joe that mirrors a common belief: that sex addicts cannot perform or become aroused by someone they actually care about.  Joe is told that the secret ingredient to sex is love, and when her more-than-coincidental reunion with Jerôme happens, she tries.  And she feels nothing.

Nymphomaniac is a film wherein it cannot possibly all mean something.  But it’s about the thought that it could, that there is something to discover in the disjointedness of the past.  It’s sometimes over-explanatory, sometimes artistic for the sake of being artistic, and visually sexual for the sake of shock, but beyond the gloss, it’s challenging, and not for its run time (Volume I is actually under two hours).  A lot feels at stake, even when the only present action is a late-night conversation between strangers.  Charlotte Gainsbourg continues to dominate difficult scenes and dialogue, and Stellan Skarsgård retains his ability to make himself someone we would want to spill our secrets to.  Stacy Martin, though, steals the movie.  She has all of the difficult physical scenes, does all the naked acrobatics with the film’s legions of homely men, and shows serious dramatic chops in her scenes with Christian Slater (who gives one of the greater performances of his recent career, at least that I’ve seen, in a character who does little but give his daughter allegories about how beautiful she is, which may or may not have contributed to her present problem).  It’s a film about failure, self-possession, self-deception, and taking walks.  It has the wrong title.  It’s also a film that made me listen to Rammstein.  Twice.

Read my writeup of Volume II here.

Nymphomaniac Volume I; written and directed by Lars von Trier; starring Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stacy Martin, Stellan Skarsgård, and Christian Slater.