Fishing, blasphemy, the souls of the trees and music are guiding threads in Joe's analeptic narration as a nymphomaniac to the so-called 'asexual' old man all night through. It creates patches of unparalleled beauty through images of indescribable depth such as the breaking spectrum of colours at the sunset, the inexplicable entry of the first patch of sunlight against the wall, the winter trees bared to their dry souls and the one Joe stands opposite, atop the hill one winter evening amid the glimmers of afterglow.
The editing, the colour scheme, the split-screens, the digital designing of the visual and explanatory digressions and all that is material to the moving image as a medium contributes to the humour and quite a brilliant Deleuzean suggestion that the cinema is inside the head and the way the story unfolds in Joe's words is nothing short of an always already formed cinematic montage in the mind. The camera hides more than it reveals and the repeated shots only draw our attention to the tangent in question. A wonderful example is the opening shot where we cannot see Joe and the camera perambulates the mise-en-scène till it repeats itself from a different perspective and we discover her lying unconscious on the street.
Volume 1 prepares us for the second and has bouts of rather uncharacteristic surface humour considering it's a Von Trier film. In this increasingly complex journey retold by Joe, what we encounter is a mathematically precise mental function of the 'nymphomaniac' and the incredibly complicated web of encounters and relationships which frame her life, giving motion to it. The plot is contrived to the extent that chance encounters anchor it all along and we pace through the psychopathology of this condition with emphases on games, radicalism, an implied Oedipal structure, a latent homoerotic streak and a stark realisation of the inextricability of sexual impulse and violence at every point in life: be it the lubrication at father's death or the sadistic torture therapy to revive the lost sexual sensation. What is problematised in the process is the maternal role of the woman, her family life and the social operation of guilt therein.
The use of numbers, geometry and knot all add fascinating mathematical dimensions to the working of her mind under a particular condition and there are the ambivalent joint hints of epilepsy as well as a divine command as it were. The question of language in relation to sexual jouissance is tackled in the episode with the Black men but like a lot of other things in the film, it's a serious provocation to begin with and it quickly turns into a comical mockery of the issue at hand.
When Von Trier tackles this obviously 'subversive' and patriarchal stereotype of the 'nymphomaniac', one at least expects a deconstructive take from him and this is where I wonder at the end of the film. How do we peace together the strong and inconsistent fragments of this portrayal which gives the appearance and only the appearance of being an author-backed position. The confusion in her position as a 'nymphomaniac' is clear throughout: on the one hand she has no qualms with what she does but then on the other hand though forced into it, she does go to a social group of 'sex-addicts' who are trying to cure themselves through absurd restrictive practices. It is also relevant to mention in this context, her final resolution after the end of her storytelling that she would renounce sexuality altogether. She also takes a rather uncharacteristic humanist pity on a pedophile who is one of her debtors in the phase in which she is working as a 'debt-collector' and the logic she uses to justify her pity is laced with contradiction: she seems to praise the pedophile for never acting upon his instincts thus remaining harmless all his life but then what about her own nymphomania in practice? Isn't this a conservative appreciation of self-repression from someone who does not practice it either?
Joe's nymphomania takes her into the criminal circuits and circumstances bring her back to a pseudo-maternal position which ironically turns into a lesbian relation of sorts until her lost husband Jerome comes back a third time by yet another stroke of chance and takes away her accomplice, successor and lesbian partner, immersing her further into the depths of jealousy and murderous rage. The classic Von Trier trope of sadomasochism in all things amorous shines again. The way the inbuilt audience figure, Joe's 'asexual' interlocutor comes back to initiate his sex life (his literary jouissance being dominated by the sexual once and for all), taking advantage of the 'nymphomaniac' and what she does to her and the way it echoes the beginning in a poignantly reddish black out--all of this has the Von Trier signature in its exposition of the audience's complicity, the implication of hypocrisy and so on.
What Von Trier offers here is a tremendously complicated and multi-layered aesthetic object which both underpins and mocks the consistency of our endless urge to interpret. All the actors are excellent but Charlotte Gainsbourg, who is clearly one of the finest of contemporary actresses and Stellan Skarsgård dominate throughout.
1 comment:
Well put. I watched these two volumes back to back yesterday and am still reeling from the effect. One cannot stop after the first because of multiple reasons. Mister director has been successful in making his audience contemplate and do a bit of soul-searching. Even Poirot would say, 'human nature is complex'. And your write-up came at the right moment.
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