Film review: Nymphomaniac I & II

A surplus of sex scenes, interspersed with dry lectures on angling, knots and mathematics. Hardcore content packaged like an old-fashioned story. Sexual violence and sadomasochism analyzed politely over tea and cake. Orgies rendered banal and boring. Disney sidekick Shia LaBeouf encouraging the insertion of spoons where spoons shouldn’t go. Billy Elliot brandishing a horsewhip (not for a horse). A sex film that manages to be overwhelmingly unsexy. Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac is a sweaty, gyrating mass of contradictions.

Be warned: the whole thing is also four hours long. But, as everyone knows: it’s not the length, it’s what you do with it. So what does von Trier do with it?

First, he frames the action in a curiously twee way. Avuncular old polymath Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård) is out doing his shopping, when he finds a badly beaten woman in an alley. Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) declines his offer to call an ambulance, but allows this Good Samaritan to take her home, put her to bed and give her a cup of tea while she recovers, and tells him how she came to be lying in the street.

It turns out that drinking tea and chatting are not Joe’s normal activities in bed. She confesses to Seligman that she’s a nymphomaniac, then regales him with tales of her sexual adventures, broken down into eight chapters based on some of his areas of study, such as classical music and religion.

It’s hard to think of another director who might have approached this material in the same way. At times, the Danish provocateur seems to be trying to bore his audience: Gainsbourg’s voiceover is often flat and monotonous, and lines such as, “My mother’s name was Catherine. My father called her Kay” are hardly riveting.

But he also mines it exhaustively for humor. In an uproarious bedroom farce scene that channels The Office-style comedy of cringe, Uma Thurman plays the spurned wife of one of Joe’s many lovers, who converges on Joe’s apartment with her three young sons and yet another of Joe’s conquests. They all sit down to tea.

Alongside Thurman, the all-star cast includes Christian Slater as Joe’s kindly father, Connie Nielsen as her cold mother and Willem Dafoe as an underworld enforcer. Jamie Bell gives a brief but electrifying performance as a sadist to whom Joe turns for flogging when her sex life is flagging – watching Billy Elliot will never be the same again.

Despite a very strange accent, LaBeouf, as Joe’s longest-term love interest Jerôme, acquits himself respectably in early scenes with young Joe, played compellingly by newcomer Stacy Martin (their first time is preceded by the comic exchange: “If I asked you to take my virginity, would that be a problem?” “No, I don’t see a problem.”). However, he struggles to hold his own in later scenes with veteran actor Gainsbourg. He was either miscast or the selection of a Disney alumnus was LvT’s little joke.

Ultimately, for all its star shagging, Nymphomaniac is about the pain of addiction, and is more forlorn than filthy.