Berlinale 64: What kind of a fury porn animal NYMPHOMANIAC 1 is?!?...

 

Nymphomaniac, Part 1: A PORN?

There were appplauses and hilarity at the official screening of the wicked film of Von Trier, "Nymphomaniac 1",
a self proclaimed “porn d’auteur”.

...But his pledged scandal was nothing more than a sterile “exercice de provocation”...

...She had discovered having a certain sensibility in her vagina when she was two.
Or at least this is what Joe says to a man who rescued her after a bloody agression.
Her flashback departs from far, from her childhood and her adventures on a humid pavement.
It is the narrative of a nymphomaniac, a girl who, years later,
will manage to obtain even 10 orgams a day with distinct partners.

Behind that continous craving for mating, there is of course the longing for sexual gratulation...
but there is also, perhaps, something else...

 

 We therefore have the pacient and her analyst.
She tells her story, and he establishes possible analogies with fishing, philosophy, and classical music.

There are numerous explicit sex scenes.
It is though dfficult to say how many are real, played by the official cast, and which are those ennacted by porn actors or filmed with prostetics.

Sex is not absent, though. Yet eroticism is.

In perfect accordance with Lars Trier’s vision and his desenchanted detective eye on the human soul.

 The dialogue between Joe and Seligman appears to be extremely didactic, whereas Joe’s character seems rather static.
She evolves little or at all during the 2 hours of the film.

If “Shame” by Steve McQueen succeeded in presenting sui generis the sexual perversion of a man,
Von Trier fully overlooks the “tension” side of the story.
He does not allow us to really pierce, not even for a second,
in the sensations, in the yearning or the regrets of his protagonist.
She always remains an outlying character, impossible to read,... and honestly not that exciting!

 So in the end, the best part of the film is not the promised sex,
but that grotesque intermezzo of a familly crisis,
remarkably played by Uma Thurman.

 In her essay called “Pornographic imaginary”, Susan Sontag was stating, when analysing “Histoire d'O” by Dominque Aury,
that in all pornography the starting point is the loss of individuality.

Therefore this uncut version of “Nymphomaniac” is not a porn.
Not only because sex scenes are not that explicit, after all,
but mainly because what in the director’s eyes would appear as provocation,
is nothing more than serial and promiscuos sexuality,
invigorated by an unsolved Ellectra’ complex.

 This extremely long first chapter seems, ultimately,
to be nothing more than a soap bubble...

It appears to be the less inspired film by Von Trier, with his frosty form of extremism in his images.

Lars Von Trier’s film is ultimately not a porn
because the experience it tells about
is not pornographic
in the sense described by Sontag.
It has nothing to do with any extatic
or dyonissiac experience.

As Joe has never experienced, through sex, a loss of her SELF.

Bien au contraire...

By Giulia Dobre