NYMPH()MANIAC: VOLUME I

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Just as with Harvey Weinstein’s famous mistake of splitting Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” into two parts, the producers of Lars von Trier’s 240 minute film have seen fit to split it in two, rather than deliver the movie as the filmmaker intended. Big mistake.

The result is exactly what you would expect, that of watching half of a movie. It is not a fair way for an audience to screen the film, much less an acceptable format for a critic to judge and contextualize it by. To make matters worse, there will also be a 5.5 hour director’s cut that will demand interested viewers cover old ground if they are invested enough to want to see von Trier’s entire film. Meh. Pshaw. 

Volume I establishes the character of Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg), a self-hating nymphomaniac rescued from the cold ground of a brick-wall-surrounded courtyard by Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård), a thematically-charged character whose sole purpose — in Volume I at least — is as a human sounding-board and harmonizing influence for Joe's litany of sexual transgressions.

Seligman is a lonely guy, a bit too pleased to have in his company a piece of female damaged-goods who wants nothing more than to spill the beans about her life of wild and naughty sexual diversions — indeed her sexual experiences are many and varied. Joe is one carnally voracious girl. The titillation dial is stuck on ten.

The film opens on a black screen. Water tinkles. The viewer is left to imagine its source. Is someone taking a leak? No. Snow is falling, and melted ice drips down a tin drain.

A passed-out Joe lies bloodied on the pavement of a well-concealed courtyard outside of Seligman's apartment. Seligman awakens her. He offers to call an ambulance or the police. Joe threatens to run off if he does. It’s tea that she wants. He invites her inside his sparsely appointed place and puts her in bed. The defenseless Joe begins to recount her sexually adventurous life that led up to her present wounded condition — possibly from some act of revenge or semi-public bit of BDSM.

Seligman not only isn’t judgmental about Joe's checkered past, he finds all sorts of reference points from his own life — related to things such as fly-fishing. He sees similes in her troubled tale of bedding as many as ten men per day. Seligman is a dilettante counselor who is patient, and effete enough to listen to Joe’s outrageously erotic stories without becoming visually aroused or making a pass that would surely be easily received.

Not all of Joe’s flashbacks are sexual. She fondly remembers walking though a winter forest with her doting father (Christian Slater). Joe’s erotic journey is broken into chapters — four for each film. “The Compleat Angler” is the first section. Joe recounts playing a sexual conquest game with her best friend, in which the two teenage girls would compete for a bag of candies by seeing how many men they could seduce during a train ride. Joe gets extra points if she can extract a load from a married man on his way to impregnate his ovulating wife. His cock does indeed find its way into Joe’s hungry mouth. No surprise how that scene ends.

Joe’s flashback description of losing her virginity — at her own request — to Jerôme (Shia LaBeouf), a local London boy with a moped, brings up the fact that he "humped her three times in the front, and five times in the back." Seligman identifies Joe’s “most humiliating numbers” as following a Fibonacci series. Von Trier steals a page from Peter Greenaway when he superimposes graphic onscreen sub-titles and diagrams of the way Fibonacci numbers are used. Referenced is the way they approximate the natural order of a seashell. The numbers themselves flash on the screen as Jerôme pumps away at a younger version of Joe (played by a fearless Stacy Martin).

As Joe’s personal tales of knee-jerk seductions go on, the sex scenes become gradually more graphic, and the sideline humor more sly. During the film’s third chapter “Mrs. H,” Uma Thurman plays the vengeful and curious wife of the man who has left her in order to be with Joe. Neither Mr. nor Mrs. H has any idea that they are interrupting a busy evening of carefully timed assignations that Joe has planned with various men.

Nymph()maniac is a sly piece of anti-slut-shaming cinema aimed at demystifying female carnal desire. It is a character-study of an ostensibly rare type of sexually ravenous woman. Von Trier creates a new breed of social satire that is equally daring and tame. While the film is fiercely pornographic, it does not represent pornography per se.

“Love is the secret ingredient” that Joe denies and yet secretly seeks. Her loss of the ability to orgasm coincides with her father’s imminent death. Volume II promises to follow Joe’s experimentation into fetishized BDSM. 

To be continued...

Not Rated. 117 mins.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

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Swedish Exploitation Mystery
Stieg Larsson Gets Posthumously More Famous
By Cole Smithey
 
The first film adaptation of the late Swedish novelist Stieg Larsson's posthumously published "Millennium Trilogy," "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" is an enigmatic mystery thriller fired by the growling intensity of its goth-girl heroine Lisbeth Salander (ferociously played by Noomi Rapace).

Although the large dragon tattoo that covers her back is never directly addressed in the film, the Asian symbol of primordial vengeance lurks gracefully at the frayed dark edges of every scene.

Lisbeth is a freelance computer hacker/activist who comes to the aid of financial journalist/magazine editor Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) whose efforts at exposing corporate corruption have resulted in a prison sentence for libel.

In the months before abdicating his freedom, Blomkvist is hired by Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube) to solve the 40-year-old mystery of his niece Harriet's disappearance from the family's island estate when she was 16 during a family gathering.

Lisbeth has been keeping tabs on Blomkvist's computer activities for a client, and finds herself in the unlikely position of teaming up with Mikael to solve the mystery of Harriet Vanger, whose vanishing seems connected to other such similar cases in the area over several generations. Following in the same vein as "The Red Riding Trilogy," here is an infectiously compelling mystery brimming with intriguing characters and plenty of twists and turns.

"The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" is a sophisticated piece of exploitation cinema that announces its identity as such early on. Nils Bjurman (Peter Andersson) is the newly appointed attorney responsible for doling out financial support to Lisbeth. During their initial meeting, Nils makes it clear that Lisbeth is expected to perform certain favors in exchange for any additional spending money she might need.

Poor Nils should know better than mess with such an obviously badass chic, but he rapes her anyway. Soon the phallus is on the other foot, and director Niels Arden Oplev takes great satisfaction in rewarding Lisbeth with her quick and just revenge. Definitely not for the squeamish, the over-the-top scene takes on a camp quality as Nils is more than paid back in kind.

With such genre formalities out of the way, the film sets about tackling skeletons in the closet of the Vangers, a rich family of Swedish industrialists. As the wealthy former head of his family's companies, Henrik Vanger offers to help with Mikael's legal problems and flailing magazine if he will unravel the mystery surrounding his niece under a pretense of writing about the family history. With more than a passing reference to "Blow Up," Lisbeth and Mikael tear into the case from a guest house on Hedeby Island where rival family members still live. The sleuthing duo examine photographs of Harriet just before she vanished with a fine tooth comb of modern technology.

The possibility that Harriet is looking directly at her abductor in a photo taken during a parade fills the film with a ripe brand of suspense. The fetishistic experience of searching for clues where none have been found before serves as a major hook that contributes to the romantic connection that builds between Lisbeth and the much older Mikael.

Although the film's violent set-piece climax is drawn out to comic proportions, and the final tableau rings with a false note of commercial satisfaction, "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" is a beautifully crafted thriller that kicks you in the head, heart, and libido with equal force.

(Music Box Films) Not Rated. 152 mins.

DANCER IN THE DARK

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Danish writer/director Lars von Trier completes his Gold Heart trilogy (behind Breaking the Waves and The Idiots) with a tragic melodrama thinly disguised as a musical.

Forget that "Dancer in the Dark" garnered the coveted Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for Best Film, and provided Icelandic rock singer/cum actress Bjork the prize for Best Actress.

It’s a movie that audiences find at turns to be simultaneously boring and exasperating, while at the same time, paradoxically original and emotionally wrenching.

By setting the story in a 1962 Washington state that never existed, von Trier casts a multi-national shadow of social satire over a thought provoking film that pushes cinema off the edge again and again.

The story traces the decline of Selma (Bjork) a Czech immigrant factory worker and single mother who is going blind from a genetic disease. Selma works around the clock at a wash basin factory, and puts bobby pins on cards as a side job, in order to save enough money to pay for her 10-year-old son’s operation to prevent him from going blind. Selma’s hopes and dreams come crashing down when her police sheriff neighbor/landlord Bill (David Morse) tries to steal her money, and forces her to execute him. What follows is a treatise on everything from introverted behavior and alienation to capitalist greed and our flawed judicial system.

That von Trier accomplishes all this with shaky hand-held video cameras in a context that deconstructs the musical genre, while at the same time reversing conventions of the empathetic protagonist, is gravy on the soup. Selma’s song and dance reveries come later in the story than you’d expect. And when the musical set-pieces finally do arrive, they only signal disaster in scenes that immediately follow.

Far from the custom of American musicals in which characters break into song when their romantic emotions overflow, Selma escapes into music and song as her only defense against the harsh reality that closes in around her. This musical dependency soon infects the audience, as von Trier balances the dissonance between silence and music. The harmony that Selma hears in the clamor of machines around her at the factory, or in a passing train on the bridge where she walks, is not only a calming distraction, but a necessary tool of survival.

Selma is a kind of idiot savant, not far removed from the fiercely committed Bess character in von Trier’s tremendously effective film Breaking the Waves. Selma is committed to avenging the guilt she feels over bringing her son Gene (Vladica Kostic) into the world with the knowledge that he would go blind. She has only one clear objective — to pay for the operation that will save his eyesight.

Selma isn’t equipped to engage in a romantic relationship with her ardent suitor Jeff (Peter Stormare); a relationship that could help her cope with raising her son and with her pending blindness. She doesn’t reach out to her best friend Kathy (Catherine Deneuve) for anything more than companionship the two women share at work or while watching musicals in the local cinema.

Selma represents a kind of holy martyr who can only find peace by performing a set of actions that will fuel an irrevocable dramatic catharsis for herself. She seeks to define herself by sacrifice. Her conscious mistakes and subsequent punishments send a sullen shock of emotion into an audience by von Trier’s unflinching view of artifice as a spontaneous existential experience.

Bjork’s fiery and inquisitively genuine performance places a regal pattern on the fabric of von Trier’s aggressively avant-garde film. When she sings "I’ve Seen It All" at a moment when her eyesight is nearly gone, it gives a punk sensibility to the ferocity of her soaring voice.

Everything about Bjork and Dancer in the Dark is enigmatic in an uncomfortable dissecting way that shows beauty in the crudest way, and crudeness in the complexity of advanced social mores. Von Trier’s movie is a larceny of style, emotion, and ideals, away from dramatic code and cinematic license. It’s also an art film that will stick with you for the rest of your life.

Rated R. 141 mins.