I attended the noon screening of Lars Von Trier‘s Nymphomaniac, Volume One with my soul and spirit engaged, but it wasn’t long before I began to feel vaguely anesthetized and zoned out.
This explicit first portion of the 5 and 1/2 hour Nymphomaniac (which will probably be unveiled in its entirety at next May’s Cannes Film Festival) is an intelligent, jaggedly assembled, dispassionate wank that aims to provoke and intellectually arouse with an assortment of classroom observations about a young girl’s scientific, emotionally arid approach to compulsive sexuality, but without anyone (including audience members) getting off or feeling serene for the experience.
Metaphors about fly fishing and the shapes of leaves abound, but libidinal stirrings are not on the table.
![](/images/column/fugberlin/martinclass.jpg)
Stacy Martin in
Lars Von Trier‘s
Nymphomaniac.
I guess I should give Von Trier credit for having achieved this peculiar synthesis. A dry, ironic tone does contribute to a series of faintly satiric philosophical points, and an assortment of explicit sex depictions are made to seem quite clinical and occasionally tedious, and vaguely repellent from an emotional/spiritual standpoint. Deliberately, I mean.
For this is a meandering, discursive, tension-free wankathon that I’m now vaguely associating in my head with Dusan Makavejev‘s W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (’71). I saw it on VHS too long ago to remember much, but I’ve read enough reviews to know that W.R. was generally regarded as somewhere between a put-on and cinematic nerve gas. Despite enthusiastic arias that festival dweebs may be writing about Von Trier’s film as we speak, Nymphomaniac, Volume One definitely lives up to the W.R. challenge.