How can such an amateurish, plot less movie with poor acting even receive such a high rating? I just don't get it. First of all there is zero chemistry between the two main characters. At least a minimum of that would be fair to expect now that they are supposed to not just become friends - despite of two totally different personalities - but a romantic couple. Like in the movie Adele there is absolutely no explanation as to how they become attracted to each other - they are just suddenly making love, from one frame to the next. The whole build-up is skipped. And apart from that there are just way too many plot holes and unrealistic scenes. E.g. Mona goes on a trip with her new friend without knowing where they are going - yet she did bring a bikini for their swim! How was that possible? Is she a fortune-teller? Also her friend brought a bikini - even though it seems unplanned that they went for that swim. As there were nobody else around, and they did not plan the swim - they would have done it in the nude, and voila - there you would have the missing build-up. Instead we get a quick, fully-bikini-clothed kiss. That's all. Heterosexual girls also kiss, thus this is nowhere near any lesbian approach. And what made her brother turn Christian? Nobody knows. Yes, he explains how he saw the light etc. but the individual, life-turning event that triggered his sudden clergy is just added to the way too many unanswered questions. The whole movie seems plot less, just moving from one pathetic, boring, silly, unrealistic scene to the next. The shortfalls are so many and so obvious that the unusually high rating of this movie - even from critics - is just incredible.
Reviews
2 Reviews
Nymphomaniac: Vol. I
(2013)
Trier dancing in the dark
1 January 2014
Warning: Spoilers
"My next movie will be a porn movie!" Lars von Trier announced for Stellan Skarsgaard. And so it went. Nymphomaniac was created.
A nymphomaniac is - as the main character Joe's (shortlived) therapist points out - not a sex addict. A nymphomaniac is the male fantasy's concept of a woman who on a sexual level is insatiable. Is Joe a product of Lars von Trier's imaginations or is she a product of denial of one's own limitations causing a positive spin on any personal issue? The condition is never treated from a true therapeutic perspective, but instead assessed through a non- chronological history of sexual encounters with different partners in different flavors. None of them ever amounts to anything more than trivial pocket philosophy and fluffy poetry, mainly worded by the self- diagnosed asexual Seligman who picked her up from the street, where she was found beaten, and listens to her stories. I wonder why Trier could not come up with any better comparison to searching for a partner than that of going fishing. Evolutional theories, for example, would be less plausible, but still close - unless he purposefully wanted to make the points as easy as possible for the audience. Seligman explains everything in detail so that nobody are dropped during the 2 x 2 hours.
Not much is left to our reflection, and surely not to our imagination, either. Penetrations and fellatios fill the screen more than once. Trier is one of the few directors who looks to the porn industry for filling his cast and completing the scenes as he wants them to be. But why? What happened to "Less is more"? For Trier, there seems to be only "More is more". As the opening credits say, this is a shortened and censored version of his work - with his acceptance but without his interference. As you would expect, there are a lot more and much more graphic sex scenes than the vast majority through cinematic history, including the above activities. Art? Porn? Provocation? You be the judge, but in either case the justification of it does not automatically follow.
Trier introduces a new genre called digressionism in which we wander off the main route to a number of side-stories. A genre that will surely cause a lot of headache in Hollywood. I am not a fan of Hollywood, either, but Trier has for one always enjoyed doing things his own way. For the same reason, I also have a feeling that most of his work is more about himself and his own thoughts than it is about us and our surroundings. Some passages I suspect to address his own childhood - loneliness, abandonment, fear, enigma etc. We never get a chance to get really deep in much of the story before it moves on - or back to Seligman and Joe talking in the room.
The humor and self-irony is a refreshing aspect, but unfortunately does not help delivering a work that succeeds in reaching, meeting and touching the audience unless they are a fan of Trier and enjoy being a witness of his latests creations he wants us to see. Some points in the movie miss the mark, and there are a few technical flaws in the cut - unless they are just meant to be artistic stunts.
In the end, Joe becomes a Joke, stereotyped to the literal point of pain, with no intimacy, but instead a lot to giggle or cringe at. Add to that a lot of clichés and scenes so predictable that the before-mentioned cinematic center must be nodding in recognition.
I hope for Trier that the primary purpose of this work is a tour-de-provo aimed at the noble board in Cannes, and secondarily some experiments with the new genre. Otherwise, although a Dane, I must say that I have seen better - also by himself - and at times was quite bored by the dialogs between Seligman and Joe. Trier tediously revolves around the dark, depressing, violent themes of suffering, which, even with the sparks of humor here and there, drowns the whole experience in black apathy, pointing in no other direction than down in the soil, where Joe was left.
A nymphomaniac is - as the main character Joe's (shortlived) therapist points out - not a sex addict. A nymphomaniac is the male fantasy's concept of a woman who on a sexual level is insatiable. Is Joe a product of Lars von Trier's imaginations or is she a product of denial of one's own limitations causing a positive spin on any personal issue? The condition is never treated from a true therapeutic perspective, but instead assessed through a non- chronological history of sexual encounters with different partners in different flavors. None of them ever amounts to anything more than trivial pocket philosophy and fluffy poetry, mainly worded by the self- diagnosed asexual Seligman who picked her up from the street, where she was found beaten, and listens to her stories. I wonder why Trier could not come up with any better comparison to searching for a partner than that of going fishing. Evolutional theories, for example, would be less plausible, but still close - unless he purposefully wanted to make the points as easy as possible for the audience. Seligman explains everything in detail so that nobody are dropped during the 2 x 2 hours.
Not much is left to our reflection, and surely not to our imagination, either. Penetrations and fellatios fill the screen more than once. Trier is one of the few directors who looks to the porn industry for filling his cast and completing the scenes as he wants them to be. But why? What happened to "Less is more"? For Trier, there seems to be only "More is more". As the opening credits say, this is a shortened and censored version of his work - with his acceptance but without his interference. As you would expect, there are a lot more and much more graphic sex scenes than the vast majority through cinematic history, including the above activities. Art? Porn? Provocation? You be the judge, but in either case the justification of it does not automatically follow.
Trier introduces a new genre called digressionism in which we wander off the main route to a number of side-stories. A genre that will surely cause a lot of headache in Hollywood. I am not a fan of Hollywood, either, but Trier has for one always enjoyed doing things his own way. For the same reason, I also have a feeling that most of his work is more about himself and his own thoughts than it is about us and our surroundings. Some passages I suspect to address his own childhood - loneliness, abandonment, fear, enigma etc. We never get a chance to get really deep in much of the story before it moves on - or back to Seligman and Joe talking in the room.
The humor and self-irony is a refreshing aspect, but unfortunately does not help delivering a work that succeeds in reaching, meeting and touching the audience unless they are a fan of Trier and enjoy being a witness of his latests creations he wants us to see. Some points in the movie miss the mark, and there are a few technical flaws in the cut - unless they are just meant to be artistic stunts.
In the end, Joe becomes a Joke, stereotyped to the literal point of pain, with no intimacy, but instead a lot to giggle or cringe at. Add to that a lot of clichés and scenes so predictable that the before-mentioned cinematic center must be nodding in recognition.
I hope for Trier that the primary purpose of this work is a tour-de-provo aimed at the noble board in Cannes, and secondarily some experiments with the new genre. Otherwise, although a Dane, I must say that I have seen better - also by himself - and at times was quite bored by the dialogs between Seligman and Joe. Trier tediously revolves around the dark, depressing, violent themes of suffering, which, even with the sparks of humor here and there, drowns the whole experience in black apathy, pointing in no other direction than down in the soil, where Joe was left.
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