NYMPHOMANIAC VOLUMES 1 AND 2

In a dank back alley, 50-year-old Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) lies bloodied and unconscious. Upon his return from a neighbouring convenience store, scholarly Seligman (Stellan Skarsgard) spies her and ambles over to offer assistance. Joe insists she doesn't want to alert the police about the beating she received earlier that evening; she simply wants a cup of tea.

Seligman takes Joe to his nearby apartment and lets her rest her body, while she openly confesses to be a "bad person" and, more concisely, a nymphomaniac. Intrigued by her self-diagnosis, the virginal Seligman gently probes her further - using his literary knowledge to make analogies of her behaviour comparable to fishing, Satanic worship and the divides between the Eastern and Western church.

Joe's story unfolds in the ensuing vignettes, split into eight chapters and spanning the 4-hour running time of these two volumes (truncated for commercial release from an apparent 5-hour director's cut [indeed the original workprint is said to have been 7 hours in length).

In the first chapter, we learn how Joe found her "cunt" at just two years of age. Her father (Christian Slater) was a doctor who she looked up to, when not burying her head in his medical books studying diagrams of genitalia. Her mother was in comparison a cold fish. And so, the fascination with her own body begins - along with her friendship with the equally curious B.

Fast-forward a few years for the next vignette, and a teenaged Joe (Stacy Martin) decides she wants to lose her virginity to local moped lad, Jerome (Shia LaBeouf). She visits him at his gaff and propositions him: his response is cold, methodical and painful - her first time involves the involuntary act of sodomy.

From there, Joe licks her wounds for a short while before realising she has a taste for sexual contact. What's more, B (Sophie Kennedy Clark) is, if anything, even more precocious: she creates a game where both must ride a busy train and sleep with as many strangers as possible before reaching their destination. The prize? A bag of chocolate sweets. Joe wins by way of performing a double-or-nothing blowjob on a man who'd been saving his load for his ovulating wife.

As Joe goes through adolescence, her relationship with B strains under the weight of the rebellion group they form and later dissolve, and she gets a job as an office secretary. In a twist of fate that even Seligman doubts, Joe claims that her boss ends up being Jerome.

Eventually, we follow Joe through her marriage to Jerome and motherhood shortly after. Her constant extra-marital affairs apply stress to that set-up - and, by the beginning of Volume 2, Joe has taken to craving sexual liaisons of a more dangerous nature. These begin with a threesome with two foreign-speaking black men that goes amusingly awry.

Her next flirtation with danger is less humorous. Joe tracks down K (Jamie Bell), who has a reputation for doling out violence upon bored housewives. Joe hopes their afternoon trysts may temper her lust, but instead she finds the pain K inflicts to be ultimately arousing.

This leads to more trouble for Joe, in the form of child neglect; a more conventional therapy group; finding employment as a rather novel debt collector; taking in and mentoring young P (Mia Goth); and ultimately taking the hiding that leads to her being found in an alley by Seligman.

Writer-director Lars von Trier is no stranger to controversy. After an impressive start to his career with the groundbreaking TV film THE KINGDOM, his first real big-screen classic came in the form of BREAKING THE WAVES - a tale that challenged ideals of religion, sex and faith.

Raising even more eyebrows was the subsequent THE IDIOTS. Shot in true Dogme style (no special effects, artificial lighting etc), the film also proved its verite chops by having members of its cast briefly perform unsimulated sex. The later DOGVILLE's centre-piece was a harrowing rape.

Then, of course, there was ANTICHRIST. A thoroughly miserable piece of filmmaking that echoed the director's depressed state of mind at the time, ANTICHRIST began with scenes of child falling to their death from a balcony, and culminated in footage of genital mutilation that ranks among the most extreme content yet to have been passed uncut by the BBFC.

Its follow-up was the comparatively restrained MELANCHOLIA, which skimped on the confrontational detail but still managed to deal with the end of the world. And we got to see Kirsten Dunst's breasts.

Oh, and who can forget the director's stupid pro-Nazi comments at Cannes just a few years ago? All designed to shock, of course.

And now, NYMPHOMANIAC. The final part of a supposed trilogy about female saints, began by ANTICHRIST and continued by MELANCHOLIA. Gainsbourg is a central character in each one, but otherwise there is little to attach each film.

Whereas ANTICHRIST was unremittingly bleak and MELANCHOLIA seemed to derive some pleasure from taking an initially optimistic scenario and erasing all hope along the way, NYMPHOMANIAC sees von Trier in much more playful mode. Take, for example, a loose re-enactment of ANTICHRIST's infamous opening scene (even set to the same operatic piece of music) which teases the audience into fearing the worst and then lets them off ... only to break their heart a little later using the same child, but in a different manner.

Elsewhere there is a lot humour to be found in the conversation between Joe and Seligman. He's often sarcastic while her efforts to marry chapters of her life to objects in his sparse bedroom (a mirror; a painting etc) become increasingly bizarre. The early stories also work in a lot of absurd, oddly amusing moments, such as Joe's sexual escapades while posing as a piano teacher and a confrontation with the wife of one of her fucks (Uma Thurman).

Of course, this being von Trier, he still feels the need to shock us. So, yes, expect a lot of full-frontal nudity, and moments of 'real' sex. That is, scenes of penetration and fellatio that make clever (and seamless) use of computer-aided superimpositions of porn stars' genitalia in scenes where the lead performers act through the motions. Hence, it's not really LaBeouf's penis we see getting ridden by Martin - despite it appearing in the same frame as his face. And Gainsbourg doesn't really take a guy's cock in her mouth later in the film, as convincing as it does look.

That last action deserves special mention. This is the scene where Joe, as a debt collector who uses her sexual knowledge of men to pin-point her victims' weaknesses and then blackmail them into payment, arouses one client by describing him in a hypothetically paedophilic scenario. She then fellates his hard penis, explaining to Seligman that she felt a mixture of pity and admiration towards a would-be paedophile who had spent a lifetime repressing his urges because he realised they were wrong. This scene perfectly demonstrates both von Trier's playfulness (it's not only implausible in the extreme but broaches levels of ludicrous tastelessness more suited to something like A SERBIAN FILM) and desire to shock (in this instance, von Trier's blatant attempt at baiting his detractors smacks of childish desperation). This scene is very nearly the undoing of the entire "serious" film, and is saved only by the interplay between Joe and a befuddled Seligman afterwards.

Throughout the film there are odd relationships and little situations that blur the lines between arthouse, shock cinema and semi-successful comedy. Each character is not only offbeat, but they all appear to have forced accents too. LaBeouf's English accent has been famously lambasted by the mainstream press (it's actually not THAT bad), while Gainsbourg sounds like she's reciting Shakespeare and Skarsgard could often be vocally mistaken for Liam Neeson. As with every von Trier screenplay, the dialogue can often be portentous - and this fact is amplified by the mannered, theatrical vocal performances throughout.

Still, a large part of me believes - and is backed up to an extent by the bonus features in this set - that this is intentional on von Trier's part. Joe's story is being told by her but visualised through Seligman's interpretation. The emphasis is not so much on realism, but on his perception of the characters and events he's been told of. And it's fair to say the audience doubt Joe's facts along the way, just as Seligman does on occasion. So von Trier is asking us to view NYMPHOMANIAC as more of a fairytale than a kitchen sink drama...?

The film does work on this level. And what's better is the ambiguity surrounding Joe's tales does come to a head somewhat at the end, during the final scene - which unfortunately I can't (won't) elaborate on here due to spoiler complications. The final scene, while on the one hand dumb and predictable to the point of feeling like a lazy conclusion, also serves upon reflection to cleverly leave the viewer with the sense that Joe has both overcome a personal demon and succumbed to a monstrous act she'd only moments earlier congratulated herself for having avoided.

On a personal level, I found the performances odd but fell into them given time. The dialogue was sometimes stilted and didn't offer much insight into Joe's affliction - addicts lead lonely lives; a male whore would not be berated in the way a female one is: yup, think I knew those pearls of wisdom already - but does gather pace during Volume 2.

In fact, Volume 2 is where the film really gathers momentum. Bell is a surprise, his quiet intensity bringing a real menace to his paradoxically quite sedate scenes. There is a tension to the second Volume that its predecessor lacks; perhaps we know by then that events are surely leading to Joe's savage beating. But also, it's in the second Volume that all aspects of Joe's life begin to crumble - career, family, health - and such a descent into Hell is always grimly compelling.

The sex is explicit, as intimated above. But in truth there's nothing here that pushes the envelope further than previous censor-dodgers such as SHORTBUS or BAISE MOI. The longer, so far unreleased cut apparently contains much more sex. If anything, I think this would harm the pace. What's here is relatively brief stuff, but feels like it fits right within the flow of the story's telling.

The filming style offers a mix of the jagged editing and handheld camerawork that distinguishes the likes of BREAKING THE WAVES and MELANCHOLIA, along with the more stylised beauty of films like ANTICHRIST and THE ELEMENT OF CRIME.

Is NYMPHOMANIAC profound? I don't think so. Does it feel like von Trier's living up to his own press? To an extent, yes. Is it compelling in its own right regardless of its shortcomings? Most certainly. There's a lot of memorable moments in the film, as mentioned above - and performances from the likes of Martin, Kennedy Clark and Bell really are impressive. One thing's for sure, there isn't another film like it.

Artificial Eye have released both Volumes as a single 2-disc blu-ray set. Each disc contains its own Volume, uncut as per the version released theatrically, as nicely sized MPEg4-AVC files.

The film was shot in 2.35:1 with occasional moments of pillar-boxed framing during dream/flashback sequences. The ratios have been observed and presented in 16x9 enhanced form. Picture quality is excellent, boasting strong detail in close-up scenes and impressive depth in the rare longer shots. Colours are drab a lot of the time, intentionally so, but whenever von Trier toys with visual trickery to example Seligman's relation of Joe's stories to more innocent fare such as fish and trees, the vibrancy and warmth of the transfers really do become apparent. Strong blacks, a lack of compression and a total absence of unsightly digital noise reinforce the fact that these are excellent transfers.

English audio comes in 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio and 2.0 LPCM mixes. Both are good, with the former having the edge come moments such as the opening metal tune. Optional English subtitles for the Hard-of-Hearing are nicely big and easy to read.

Each disc opens to an animated main menu page. From there, pop-up menus include scene selection menus allowing access to each Volume via 12 chapters apiece.

Disc one also contains a decent array of friendly, insightful interviews. We get chats with Gainsbourg (12 minutes), a surprisingly intelligent LaBeouf (9 minutes), Martin (10 minutes) and the always-engaging Skarsgard (11 minutes). It's all good stuff but its impossible not to suspect that the lack of input from von Trier here does suggest a "director's cut" is on the horizon.

Disc two proffers a 24-minute audience Q&A recorded in London, moderated by Edith Bowman. This finds Skarsgard on gently ironic form, flanked by giggly girls Martin and Kennedy Clark. Again, it makes for a good watch. But where oh where is Lars?

I enjoyed NYMPHOMANIAC, more than I expected to. It's not pornography masquerading as art, but then I never expected it to be. It's flawed, certainly - it reeks of desperation times, stupidity at others - but on the whole it held my attention effortlessly over the course of 4 hours and gave me food for thought afterwards.

Both Volumes are well served on Artificial Eye's excellent blu-rays.

Also available on DVD.

Review by Stuart Willis