Lars von Trier
Nymphomaniac (Vol. I & II)

"Nymphomaniac is a four-hour porno. Long live Lars Von Trier."

Nothing could be further from the truth.

But let's start in order: let's avoid talking about those superfluous things that are still part of the project of one of the few authors who are simultaneously true marketing masters. So let's get out of our heads the (brilliant) orgasmic posters, the ambiguous parentheses, the teasers released well in advance, the threats of censorship, a supposed five and a half hour hard version. These are all things that add spice but die once the film sees the light, and for this reason, I am not interested in discussing them.

Lars Von Trier is a fourteen-year-old in the robust body of an adult with a mid-life crisis. He has an extraordinary visual talent (whether you love or hate him, you cannot deny it), but at the same time, he loves to play with the audience, either winking at them or crudely taking the piss out of them.
In "Nymphomaniac," Von Trier is not afraid to hide his teenager attitude for even a second: it is a four-hour naive epic that greets you with a refined sequence of silences only to slap you in the face with Rammstein with the urgency of a pissed-off child painting his room black. He has no fear of endlessly self-referencing, not for himself but, indeed, for his audience who can recognize it and is aware of falling into the trap: doesn't the child opening the gate of his crib and climbing onto the window ledge to admire the falling snow remind you of something? Von Trier is a child who likes himself, and here he is finally sincere: forgetting the aesthetics of "Melancholia" (which, however, together with "Antichrist" and "Dogville" is among his most cited films in this "Nymphomaniac"), our beloved Danish buddy returns to experiment. The audience becomes, unconsciously, complicit. And, paradoxically, is an active accomplice (actually, no: is a victim) in a solipsistic film that the author, fundamentally, shot for himself.

And hell, it turns out to be a bomb.

Let's start with the choice to divide the film into two parts for the theaters (which I watched back-to-back): the attempt is to create abstinence (clear and specific, akin to sexual abstinence) and it is no coincidence that the first volume ends with "I feel nothing." Von Trier wants you to feel the same sensations: the frustration of feeling nothing and wanting more, he wants to make you Joe in his path of self-destruction. But if she suffers in sex, you, the viewer, suffer in cinema.

"Every female protagonist in one of his films is truly Lars himself" said Charlotte Gainsbourg in a recent interview. She, the first and true muse of the Danish author, his feminine alter-ego, embodies an even more difficult role here: Charlotte Gainsbourg embodies Joe who embodies Lars Von Trier. And the dialogues themselves make us understand this: how many of you who watched the film did not think at least once that the protagonist's words seem to come out of Trier's mouth in any film conference? Because "Nymphomaniac" deals with sex not as a mere essay on sexuality or as an act of provocation (and hence the disappointment of many), but because man's perversion leads even the purest to see sex in every little thing. Thus, Joe's autobiographical journey, the instinct, fights with culture (music, art, fishing...) in a continuous succession of references, collisions, and unsettling equilibrium. Everything is reducible to sex in a film where sex coincides with cinema: everything is cinema.

"Nymphomaniac" is an extraordinarily complex film: it is, first of all, the third chapter of the "depression trilogy" where Lars self-analyzes after a long period of mental distress. As the third chapter, indeed, as a film, this is the most sincere.
It's not a film about sex; it's a film about cinema, as mentioned. Representation, narrative inconsistencies, references, analogies are continuously exhibited, turned into subtitles, discussed.

Joe cannot free herself from sex just as Lars cannot free himself from cinema.
The result is rough, raw, yet extremely elegant. Where the choice of actors (remarkable, in this regard, Jamie Bell, former Billy Elliot turned into a master of sadomasochism/sex guru, and the wonderful Uma Thurman, who, in two minutes of cameo, brings glory to one of the most beautiful scenes of the batch) supports an entire universe of tracks and sub-tracks, of cathartic psychological analysis.
A film less carnal than anticipated, where the four hours pass with enviable lightness: never a moment of boredom and a continuous journey through genres (drama, comedy, thriller...) and visual intuitions (even one of the ugliest inventions of cinema, namely split-screen, rendered even more unaesthetic here, has its expressive strength) that compose a tight and explosive climax.

A deep look inside oneself but, at the same time, a friendly and violent attack on the viewer: "Do not interrupt the story with your damn criticisms and your blank comments to denounce a hypothetical inconsistency. Do not criticize a film if you do not have the means. YOU decided to sit and listen to me, and now YOU are obliged to believe what I tell you."

The attitude is, indeed, that of an angry teenager: it is rough, it is intelligent but pretends, it doesn't scare anyone and knows it, but has a big heart.