Movie Review - Nymphomaniac: Vol. 1

Nymphomaniac: Vol. 1 ** (NR) It’s hard to imagine a more lurid title for a mainstream feature film - especially using only one word. As the story begins, charlotte Gainsbourg is lying in an alley after a beating. She’s found by Stellan Skarsgaard, whose character is a shy, scholarly fellow, living a monastic existence in his nearby apartment. He provides some first aid. She begins telling him all about her extreme sexual history, which we see in flashbacks, mainly featuring Stacy Martin as her younger self.

The tale she tells covers all the chapters of any psychosexual primer, from daddy issues to free-spirited flexing of a young woman’s appeal, to insatiable desires and disastrous complications. Skarsgard is surprisingly academic about her saga, as the dialog is laced (more accurately, laden) with references to art, history and mythologies, swathed in lyrical imagery. The upshot is two hours of far more chatter, and far less titillation than one might expect from the title and rating. There are quite a few very explicit scenes, but the overall effect is less erotic than baffling. Gainsbourg’s audience of one is not quite sure how much of what he’s hearing (and we’re seeing) is fact or fiction.

Writer/director Lars von Trier does offer a commendable attempt at realism in his casting, if not in the premise. The actors are mostly average-looking men and women, avoiding the extremes of beauty or grossness that idealize or demonize the depicted sexual activity. This view of urges and behaviors is neither romantic nor pornographic in spirit, among regular people we might work with or pass on the street without a thought about how shocking their private lives might be.

Yet the film is something of a tease, since it only takes us halfway to the point at which she’s found in that alley, leaving viewers with a case of cinematic coitus interruptus until the forthcoming opening of Nymphomaniac: Vol. 2 , which is even longer, and will be covered separately. (4/4/14)