Nymphomaniac (Part One)

An old euphemism for sexual intercourse is "carnal knowledge."  The notion that sex is a way of exploring the world, as Levi-Strauss said about certain mythical motifs, "good to think with," is integral to Lars Von Trier's depressing epic, Nymphomaniac.  On the evidence of the film's first two hours -- the movie is released in two parts -- Nymphomaniac has encyclopedic ambitions:  the film seems to a be an attempt to catalog the diversity of human thought and endeavor under the rubric of sexual desire.  The concept is an ancient one:  Socrates taught that sexual desire is the model for the acquisitive and questing aspects of the soul:  carnal knowledge turns out to be the paradigm for all knowledge and eros is the engine of the imagination that leads the soul upward toward the celestial love that sets the planets and galaxies spinning in their appointed places.  More prosaically, French philosophes like Diderot and de Sade used sexual transgression as  a vehicle for exploring other unconventional and radical notions with respect to the organization of the state, the rights of man, and the true constitution of the human imagination:  all politics and understanding is essentially sexual and embodied.  Indeed, Nymphomaniac resembles de Sade's nightmare parodies of Rousseau's Heloise,  his lavish pornographic novels Justine and Juliette.  The camera prowls a desolate maze of brick alleyways and wet, moldering dead-end corridors, a dark, rusty industrial wasteland,  and comes upon a woman sprawled across the flagstones of a tiny courtyard.  (The soundtrack features an infernal sounding tune by Rammstein.)  The woman has been badly beaten -- her features are swollen and bruised.  Although this is problematic, the camera seems to reflect the point of view of an older man, a kind of flaneur.  The man, Seligman, ("Blessed man") played by the enigmatic Stellan Skarsgaard, brings the woman to his anonymous-looking apartment -- a place that seems more a state of mind (like the maze of dank alleys) than a real location.  At his apartment, the man interviews the woman who insists that she is a transgressor and has violated the laws of man and nature -- the dialogue in the film is Byronic and high-flown, melodramatically histrionic with a tint of Ingmar Bergman's relentless savagery.  As in de Sade's novels, the woman embarks on a lengthy narrative, divided into specific book-like chapters, each episode bearing a literary title.  During the first two hours of the film, the woman (played by the formidable Charlotte Gainsbourg) tells her story in a series of flashbacks, the first of them detailing her discovery of "(her) cunt at age two."  Skarsgaard is a sympathetic interlocutor and the film cuts back to him from time-to-time as he argues with the young woman and, in fact, seems to hold her in higher esteem than she holds herself -- he is forever justifying her bad behavior or finding it philosophically compelling.  Both Skarsgaard's interlocutor and Gainsbourg's narrator are fantastically articulate, highly cultured, literate, and intelligent:  the film's encyclopedic pretensions involve learned disquisitions on mathematics (Fibonacci numbers are important to the movie's themes), literature, music, psychology, botany, and, surprisingly, the art and practice of fly-fishing.  (Skarsgaard is a fan of Izaak Walton's The Complete Angler and he equates the young woman's predatory sexual practices with using flies and bait to snare the big fish lurking in the cool depths of a river.)  Since the young woman, she names herself "Jo", sees everything as sexual, the film demonstrates an interesting paradox:  if everything is sexualized, nothing is erotic.  Although the movie dispassionately surveys dozens of sexual encounters, there is nothing pornographic or, even, remotely titillating about all the fornication on display -- rather, the couplings are filmed with cold, even, cruel, clinical precision; the sex is explicit but not arousing, like a series of diagrams from a medical textbook.  The film's erotic charge is invested in the digressions, the curious mini-essays on botany and fishing and numbers:  at one point, Jo tells her listener that if all foreskins lopped off penises were piled end to end they would reach to the moon -- a memorable, if implausible, claim; I'm still working on this calculation.  Von Trier works to keep his audience from enjoying the sex:  when his heroine trolls a train for men to fuck in the lavatory, we hear a few bars of Steppenwolf's Born to be Wild, but this is just a teaser -- the music is used as in a Godard film, just a few snippets and, then, silence.  Jo is an explorer at the outer limits of human experience:  her philosophical experiment is to divest the physical act of love from any emotional consequences, staging as many as ten sexual encounters per day.  But, of course, we know that the experiment is forbidden and will have dire consequences -- the Dane Von Trier revers Carl Dreyer and he is a kind of perverse moralist.  Jo falls in love with her first boyfriend, a kid with a motorcycle to whom she issues the imperative demand:  "Take my virginity!"  This character is played by Shia LaBoeuf, who seems baffled by his role.  (The film has a number of expensive American actors, including Christian Slater and Uma Thurman.)  Von Trier is nothing if not intelligent and penetrating and he stages several episodes that have an indelible, nightmarish impact -- particularly noteworthy are the scenes of a sex contest between the heroine and her friend on a commuter train (the girl who fucks the most men gets a small package of chocolates) and a sequence in which a wronged wife confronts the nymphomaniac in her small, airless apartment.  This part of the film, featuring a haggard-looking Uma Thurman, is extraordinary -- a combination of Sirk-style melodrama and over-the-top Kafkaesque dialogue.  Jo, like Erica Jong's heroine in Fear of Flying, wants to have sex without emotional involvement, the so-called "zipless fuck," and so she takes to rolling dice as a triage method for her innumerable lovers -- if she rolls a one, she will tell you that she loves you; a five means that she will treat you with the utmost cruelty and hostility.  Jo has rolled the dice and been told get rid of a bulky, earnest married man that she is screwing.  She tells the married man that she "loves him too much" but that he "will never leave his family" and so she must break up with him.  As he departs crestfallen, she shudders visibly with a  visceral distaste for the man.  But a couple hours later, he turns up on her doorstep with his bags packed -- he's abandoned his wife.  In a scene that borrows a little from the Marx brothers, the wife (Uma Thurman) shows up with the man's three small sons.  She says that she wants to give her husband his car keys and that she and the kids will take the bus ("public transportation," she says) to the home that the nymphomaniac has now wrecked.  The whole thing is hideous and embarrassing -- the spurned wife escorts the little boys into Jo's bedroom  to see the "whoring bed."  And, then, one of Jo's other lovers, a kid like a befuddled high school quarterback turns up at the door, forlornly clutching a bouquet of flowers.  It's a scrotum-tightening scene, a nightmare of obligation and entanglement, that goes on and on and on until everyone is wincing with abject humiliation.  Like much of the film, this scene can't be construed as realistic -- rather, it is a dream sequence like one of the more fevered episodes in an Ibsen play.  And, indeed, as the film progresses we are compelled to wonder whose fantasy we are seeing -- certainly, some of the scenes undeniably originate in the imagination of Jo's interlocutor, the patient older man played by Stellan Skarsgaard.  Perhaps, Jo is a figment of his imagination, an image of his fears of the uncanny power of women.  The first two-hours of the movie is tedious, but impressive and the movie can't be legitimately judged on its first-half.  There is a sort of narrative arc:  Jo's education of the senses, which includes becoming sexually aroused at the bedside of her dead father, culminates in an extended scene involving her cool, analytical comparison of the sexual styles of three lovers, an extended polyphonic section involving a trifucated screen, that climaxes with the heroine's paradoxical cry during intercourse that she has lost the ability to feel anything at all -- that her entire body has gone numb.  (The second half the movie has to do with the consequences of her sexual anesthesia).  The acting is flawless and the young woman, Stacy Martin, who plays the part of Jo in the flashbacks is fantastically compelling -- she gives a great performance, simultaneously tender, calculating, and indifferent:  at times, the girl looks like a child; in other scenes, she seems to be a kind of vampire.