Joe’s long confession
Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac opens with a woman found beaten and left in an alley. The man who finds her—Seligman, celibate and warmly intellectual, played by Stellan Skarsgård—takes her home and listens while she recounts her sexual history from childhood through middle age. Charlotte Gainsbourg plays Joe in the present. Stacy Martin plays her younger. The film runs four hours across two volumes, divided into chapters with titles, and Seligman keeps finding structural parallels between Joe’s confessions and fly fishing, Bach, and the Fibonacci sequence. This is not played entirely for comedy. It is also not not played for comedy.
Von Trier had, by this point, established a particular contract with his audience across Dogville, Antichrist, and Melancholia: you will be disturbed in ways that feel formal and purposeful rather than cheap, the performances will be extraordinary, and you will not be let off the hook at the end. Nymphomaniac holds to that contract. The film contains actual pornography cut against the actors’ own performances. Uma Thurman arrives in one scene and dismantles a room using nothing but a calm, conversational tone of voice. Jamie Bell plays a man who hurts people at their request, with total detachment—and those scenes are almost tender, which is the most unsettling thing about them.
What the film is actually about—distinct from what the title implies—is the relationship between desire and identity. Joe doesn’t describe her sexuality as pleasure, not exactly. She describes it as the thing that’s hers. The organizing logic of her life, the place where she’s been most honestly herself, even when it cost her everything else. That’s a different film than the one the marketing was selling, and a more interesting one.
Whether von Trier earns the ending is the question I’ve kept coming back to. There’s a move he makes in the final minutes—a reversal—that either retroactively reshapes everything or collapses it, depending on your generosity toward him. I’ve thought about it more than I expected to. I’m still not sure he gets away with it. I’m also not sure he doesn’t.