The Danish filmmaker’s previous movie was the end of the world “Melancholia” -a superb piece of apocalyptic great depresson, and the one before that was the dreaded “Antichrist” -an unwatchable piece of torment. And do it goes with Von Trier, for every “Dancer In The Dark” there is a “Dogville”. Maybe you can’t have one without the other.
Except for “Nymphomaniac, Volume One” which is neither nor, the definition of nothing very special. An elderly gentleman (Stellan Skarsgård as Seligman) finds a woman (Joe, Charlotte Gainsbourg) badly beaten in an alleyway. Joe refuses to go to the hospital because “she deserves” it and instead goes to his home where she lies in bed (for the entire “Volume One”) and tells the story of her nymphomania in flashbacks.
Joe is portrayed as a teenager by newcomer Stacy Martin, who gives a blank open face a look both open and closed. It follows her through contests on a train to see who can seduce the most men during a train ride to the logistics of juggling seven lovers a day for weeks on end. Seligman listens to her story with extreme kindness and uses fly fishing (his obsession) as a metaphor for nymphomania.
The first half ends with Joe “lubricating” immediately following her beloved father’s (Christian Slater) death and finally getting the man she may love (Shia LaBeouf) in bed and feeling nothing at all.
Nymphomania, should it be quite this dreary an occupation? And why am I being told this story any way? It is a sad and story emotional decline tied to an unfeeling mother whose neglect leads Joe to externalize who need for emotional comfort through sex. Pretty much one and one,right?
Von Trier can be great, he was with “Melancholia”, he was with the TV series “The Kingdom” but this, at least the first half, doesn’t quite happen. It is almost blandly sexual. A disappointment.
Grade: B-
