Lars von Trier (Denmark, born 1956)

Melancholia (2011)

(This review, written as part of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, freely makes reference to other films from the same list and does not read as well when taken out of its original context. It is reproduced here only for the convenience of having a director’s works collected on the same page.)

Melancholia opens with a slow-motion, dreamlike sequence in which a number of images are presented. Kirsten Dunst, and occasionally other figures, are in a huge, opulent garden. With steel in her eyes, looking like a vengeful goddess, Kirsten is shown, amongst other things, with lightning at her fingertips. Sometimes she wears a wedding dress. Visual references are made to John Everett Millais’s Ophelia. Interspersed are scenes from space- planets slowly crashing into one other- while thunderous classical music plays throughout.

Oh God, I thought. This is going to be pretentious. It was clearly going to be an art film, an indulgent one, with its arthouse stylings placed front and centre, and an entirely different approach from Leviathan’s icy distance or Once Upon a Time in Anatolia’s desolate minimalism.

I was wrong. This opening sequence is the only scene in the film of this ilk (spoilers ahead). Once the film ‘starts’, we meet a married couple, one of them Dunst, who are late to their wedding reception, and struggling to get there. It’s all fine, though. They’re giggling. They’re the picture of newly-married bliss.

But over the next hour of screen-time, things go wrong. Slowly at first, gradually. The bride’s mother stands up and essentially ruins the big day by saying things you should never say at any wedding, let alone your own daughter’s. Her father, seemingly the sweetest and most level-headed person in the room, has nevertheless somewhat provoked her into this outburst. Later, he lets his daughter down again, callously, needlessly. She makes him a simple request, and he selfishly reneges. Her boss similarly behaves bizarrely, making his own contribution to the ruination of the wedding. The bride’s behaviour becomes more and more erratic.

It was compelling. I really enjoyed it. Maybe you’re not supposed to enjoy this type of material, as such, but I did. The handheld camerawork, while perhaps sacrificing something in precision and presentation, made the work feel involving and immediate. In fact, with the possible exception of Toni Erdmann, it was the most involving and immediate piece of film I’d seen since I began the project.

The film is in two parts, though, both roughly an hour long, and the second hour- the one, I feel, which is supposed to act more as the ‘heart’ of the movie, with more import- did not have the same effect on me. It was OK. It essentially became a two-hander between Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg, and though the much-acclaimed Dunst was undeniably good throughout, Gainsbourg, in a role that required more juggling, was arguably better.

It felt like two hour-long films rather than a single cohesive one. One was a family drama that was, in its own discordant way, quite tightly structured. The other wasn’t. It felt as if much of the energy- and subsequently, much of the drama- had evaporated. This is particularly puzzling because the second half deals with a situation which is, on the face of it at least, far graver and far more serious than that of the first. Maybe von Trier is making a direct comparison between the literal end of the world and instances where peoples’ own small, insular worlds ‘come crashing down’, and purposely making the point that the latter can somehow feel just as bad. In a twist on mainstream filmmaking and the kind of standard, often quite dull heroism we see in it, we are shown that, in real life, behaving in an assured manner and insisting that everything is under control means nothing, and often simply serves to cover up gaping cracks in that person’s resolve. In this case, we’re dealing with a character who has probably gone his entire life without being in a situation he can’t control.

I don’t know why critics were so polarised. They always are with von Trier, I suppose. Overall, I felt it was a decent, solid, mature piece of work which, speaking broadly, I appreciated and liked. Nothing more, nothing less. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Incidentally, what a pleasure it was to see the late John Hurt lighting up the screen from beyond the grave.

Dogville (2003)

Dogville is one of the most formally experimental movies on our list. It is set in a small town based around two or three streets and about 15 inhabitants, except, however, there is no town- lines are drawn on a sound-stage, and the actors move around them, pretending that non-existent buildings, and sometimes other relevant props, are there. That’s the first thing that confronts the viewer, and they immediately have to decide how they feel about it.

Well, maybe not immediately. Maybe they can give the movie 20 minutes, or half an hour, and see where things go from there. As someone who knew from the start that they were obligated to watch all of it- almost three hours- that’s the approach I generally took, instead of making any snap judgements.

It might have been interesting to note that once you get far enough into the film, these things cease to matter and you stop noticing them, but I didn’t find that was the case. I was always aware of the conceit, and moreover I think that I was supposed to be. Sometimes, at points in the film where significant and meaningful aspects of the movie’s story and message are being foregrounded, this formal staging briefly becomes less important, but it is always quite undeniably there and always has a central role to play in the movie’s tone and feel.

Did it ‘add’ anything? Debatable, but I don’t think it was a detraction, and in my opinion, viewers who reacted negatively to this particular artistic method probably still wouldn’t have liked Dogville even if it had been filmed in a regular manner and presented as a regular movie. There is, however, no question that we would have been dealing with a quite different film if that had been the case. I’m struggling to imagine exactly what that would have looked like, or how it would have come across- redolent of American Beauty, perhaps, or Blue Velvet, two other movies in which the respectability of suburban life is merely a veneer for something darker and much more noxious? In any case, this is how Dogville has been filmed, and it’s up to you, on these terms, whether to take it or leave it. Personally, it was a film that I liked and respected very much. I thought it was clever, it was cohesive and it was compelling. I had to ask myself, however, why I was so receptive to this grim film, with its mordant message of despondency and hopelessness, when I had felt so lukewarm towards other recent films that covered similar tonal territory, namely Synecdoche, New York, Werckmeister Harmonies and Amour. Well, for one thing, Dogville has a storyline- it’s not the most emphatic storyline you’ll ever see, but it nevertheless has an actual storyline that runs solidly through the film and takes the viewer from A to B to C and doesn’t pull any tricks with them or spring any bizarre asides (though there is something of a revelation in the film’s final stages which I think constitutes a twist).

The ‘simulated world’ that I theorised about when covering Werckmeister Harmonies is, of course, in full evidence here. I mean, it’s absolutely front and centre. Despite this, I felt that the characters were quite real, certainly to the extent that I was interested in their motivations and behavioural qualities. Like Werckmeister Harmonies, it appears that the whole town moves as one and is almost like an entity unto itself, without individualism; unlike Werckmeister Harmonies, these characters are nonetheless individuals with their own voices, set against, though not necessarily in contradiction of, the apparent hive mindset, and thus creating fissures of narrative complexity and juxtaposition which I generally thought were missing in the Hungarian think-piece. The editing is also very quick- all of the scenes, even the most simple and straightforward ones, are a restless cluster of rapid, succinct shots, a technique I had previously found most noticeable in von Trier’s 1998 Dogme film The Idiots (if it’s present in Melancholia, it’s far more understated). Some viewers will undoubtedly find this irritating and needless, but if nothing else, it relieves the static quality the movie might otherwise have had, and in this aspect is the absolute diametric opposite of Béla Tarr’s adamantly torpid vision.

Roger Ebert kinda hated this film; although he gave it two stars out of four in his original review, he went on to include it in his worst films of the year (spoilers ahead). In particular, he viewed it as having an anti-American message, opining that ‘I doubt that we have any villages where the helpless visitor would be chained to a bed and raped by every man in town.’ Really? Not any? Not even Jordan, Minnesota? So these sorts of things, in essence, can happen in Germany, and Mussolini’s Italy, and Franco’s Spain, and Pinochet’s Chile, and Gaddafi’s Libya, and Vietnam, and the former Yugoslavia, and Cambodia, and Uganda, and Rwanda, and Haiti, and Mauritania, where in 2012 20% of the population were estimated to be slaves, and here in the UK, where in 1992 Suzanne Capper was tied to a bed and tortured for several days and eventually set alight to burn to death, with six different people involved, but not in the USA? I mean, really. What utter poppycock.

Von Trier actually said himself that the movie addresses the idea that ‘evil can arise anywhere, as long as the situation is right.’ It couldn’t really be any clearer that these themes are universal. If you really wanted to read the film as anti-American, then I suppose the most prominent sequence would be its final credits, which display a photographic montage of US poverty and degradation over the jaunty, inappropriate strains of David Bowie’s ‘Young Americans’. It’s a passage completely at odds with the movie’s overall tone and, as far as I can see, is just a facetious little wink-wink gambit from a filmmaker noted time and time again for these sorts of proclivities; from my angle, I’m surprised Roger Ebert- whom, I should probably point out, I still love, and always will- was daft enough to rise to it.

Anyway, if you’re seeking any ‘validation’ for the kinds of points von Trier makes in this film, then there is an established cultural base for them in works like The Scarlet Letter, Lord of the Flies and The Crucible, as well as Pasolini’s Salò at the (much) more extreme end of the scale. That’s not to say you have to like these points, insomuch as you have to like anything, but to call him a ‘crank’ or compare him to ‘a raving prophet on a street corner’ simply for making them, as Roger does, is, in my opinion, seriously misjudged.

What I took from Dogville was that people are opportunists- not all of them, I guess, but a great many- and if they’re given the chance, a nauseatingly high number will abuse the position they’ve been given, ostensibly undeterred by conscience, especially if they’ve also been engaged in a groupthink mentality. The film has been called misanthropic, and if it was this specific notion that brought about such a charge, then I guess I’m a misanthrope too. For me though, what I found most fascinating about the evil shown in this movie is its gradual progression- it comes along in fits and starts, just as the Nazis didn’t get the gas ovens out the very day they were elected. The townspeople behave as if everything they are doing is right and proper, that their actions are necessary in defence of a threat to their values, whatever they are, and, incredibly, that it is in fact Grace (a highly effective and commendable Nicole Kidman) who should somehow be ashamed of herself. The town’s most reasonable and moral figure, Tom, makes excuses for their behaviour and downplays it. If you don’t recognise this kind of conduct, and you’ve never been on the wrong end of it, I consider you very lucky.

In an echo of The Secret in Their Eyes, the movie’s climax gives us a slice of wish-fulfilment. We get to see the transgressors receive their just desserts, and in this instance, it is less dignified and more overblown than that of the Argentinean drama, as you squirm uncomfortably in your seat and ask yourself if this is, after all, what you really wanted.

From a purely aesthetic perspective, it was intriguing for me to see a town being razed to the ground when there is no town and nothing is in fact being razed at all. Perhaps this is a comment on the transparency of the peoples’ moral fibre, which they all pretend is real when it isn’t, a possible parallel that is at its most visually suggestive when people are knocking on non-existent doors and tending imaginary gooseberry bushes, implying that this artifice underscores every single aspect of their daily lives.

Ultimately? A sprawling, singular, searing missive from one of cinema’s most incendiary and inimitable polemicists.

Breaking the Waves (1996)

Breaking the Waves concerns Bess (Emily Watson), a Scottish woman of around thirty whose sweetness and good nature are offset by volatile mental instability, a decidedly unorthodox relationship with religious belief and, from time to time, a hot temper. She has just married Jan (Stellan Skarsgård), a man who seems uniquely positioned to provide her with the kind of protection that her frailties require.

It looks like the people of the town she has grown up in do not really consider Bess to be anything much better than a village idiot, including her own mother; they are then annoyed that Jan does not see her their way at all, and is helping her to re-appraise her self-image.

Breaking the Waves, of course, pre-dates Dogville, but I saw Dogville first, and so it is in a somewhat retrospective fashion that I identify and address their obvious thematic similarities. As Von Trier paints yet another small community as vicious and malevolent, specifically towards a young woman that they have singled out and specifically for reasons of supposed sexual provocation, I deduce that this is another barbed criticism of groupthink, proffering that a collection of people should not behave as if they are one organism and it is creepy and unsettling- ‘inhuman’- when they do, potentially leading to some very dark and sinister consequences. I agree wholeheartedly. There’s nothing wrong with the notion of community, and there’s nothing wrong with a community ‘coming together’, but there are limits, and we would be wise to observe them.

In a von Trier film, sex is complicated, polyphonic- it can be enjoyable and alluring, whilst it can also be a potent whirlpool of psychological tension and threat. Our collective obsession with it, and fear of it in some cases, is ruthlessly exploited, and some viewers may then feel he has reduced it to a mere tool, wielded in a mercenary fashion, to elicit a decidedly cheap brand of shock and awe. Similar things could be said of other great directors, Kieslowski and Almodóvar among them. Unlike Dogville, wherein Nicole Kidman’s Grace was undoubtedly a straightforward victim of rape, Breaking the Waves introduces a semblance of consent to the sexual traumas of its lead character, and even questions whether she is somewhat granting consent for the ‘wrong reasons’, with her fragile demeanour making everything even more of a queasy grey area.

Such issues may emerge every time a male director makes points about female sexuality- ones they perhaps have no ‘right’ to make- and especially when their process seems to eschew any notion of modesty or subtlety. When Lynch does this- Blue Velvet being probably the most pertinent example- these aspects intermingle amongst layers of unreality and are saturated with overt stylisation, ostentatious technique and something of an ironic aftertaste. Von Trier, of course, dips his toes into these waters too, but doesn’t generally swim in them the way Lynch or Almodóvar does, and so his movies can, amongst other things, appear to be more baldly perverse.

Maybe they are. But perversions exist, and so do cruelty and nastiness, and it would be inexplicable if cinema never reflected that. Von Trier wants to make a movie that will affect you- he would rather you walked away annoyed and perturbed by an unusual, challenging movie than leave the cinema with a smile on your face and a warm fuzzy feeling having watched a film incredibly similar to hundreds of others and whose title you will struggle to remember after a week. He is a director who is perfectly willing to show mentally ill people as scary and repellent- not ‘just like everyone else, really’ so that the nice normals in the audience can comfortably understand and identify with them. In this vein, you might not always be sure exactly how he feels about his main character, or whether he respects her- sympathy and punishment are doled out in almost-equal spades.

One wonders if you can leave the movie’s sexual politics to one side and simply consider it a compelling piece of character-driven drama. One then wonders if the highly-charged sexual element is what gives this film its ‘edge’, and also why any of this should necessarily be a problem when the movie is so clearly aimed at a mature audience who are expected to have the intellect and wherewithal to absorb it appropriately.

Anyhow, when one praises von Trier, it seems to come with certain assumptions. It may now be concluded that you think he is a misunderstood genius, which I don’t, and that you think everything he has said and done has been well-judged, which I also don’t. One might assume that I am really looking forward to watching Antichrist and The House That Jack Built, which I’m not- I might never watch them. But in my view, where Melancholia, Dogville, and Breaking the Waves are concerned, these are, to varying extents, innately good films (though I would say Breaking the Waves is my least-favourite of the three). They want you to think. They want you to feel things. They do not show humans in a particularly positive light, and there’s no reason why an artist should do that if it’s not how they see the world. There always, however, seems to be at least one person in a von Trier film who is sensible and decent, thereby imbuing the picture with crucial, gnawing tension as reasonable people struggle against the vagaries of unreasonable ones. Here, the role is fulfilled by Katrin Cartlidge’s character, Dodo, and possibly also the doctor played by Adrian Rawlins, along with Jan’s two affable friends and possibly- notwithstanding her tantrums- Bess herself. This preponderance of relatable characteristics make Breaking the Waves feel sadder and more tragic than both Dogville and Melancholia, and also less straightforward, less easy to fully get to grips with.

And what about Jan? That’s a different story entirely. There is absolutely no way to tell what his true intentions are, and whether he is ultimately a toxic influence in Bess’s life that she should have stayed well away from. Herein lie the complexities of effective drama.

Dancer in the Dark (2000)

After Melancholia, Dogville and Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark is my fourth von Trier movie in a row which presents me with a portrait of a woman in struggle. Often, the woman in question is being undercut or misunderstood or trampled on in some way by society or by people close to her, and this movie fits entirely within that mould.

When I covered Mulholland Drive, I commented that ‘There are two ways to look at [recurring], derivative elements. One is that through re-iterating and re-constituting themes from his other works, David Lynch is accentuating the auteur nature of his oeuvre. The other is that these qualities are now feeling like re-heated food and starting to go a bit stale’. This movie too, I feel, raises these sorts of questions.

It is understandable that an artist who is not chasing trends or any specific calculated commercial breakthrough, and for whom creative expression is always the primary motivating factor, may choose to regularly revisit the same refrains in their work. JMW Turner, for example, was compelled to paint maritime storms and shipwrecks, time after time after time, year after year after year. One can only really speculate why- was it because he felt somewhat dissatisfied with his previous shipwrecks, and was trying, quasi-obsessively, to ‘get it right’?

I don’t think that’s the case with von Trier. I don’t think he’s trying to perfect a formula, I think he simply makes the film he wants to make, and if you don’t like it, so be it, which is, in my opinion, an inherently good attitude for an artist to have. All filmmakers should have it really, and so should everyone else in the creative sphere- at least those who are not making works for children.

So why did I find Dancer in the Dark so limp? Maybe ‘limp’ is too strong a word, and maybe the movie’s perceived ineffectiveness is solely a byproduct of ‘diminishing returns’ when placed against the three previous movies mentioned, two of which post-date this one (trying to get a handle on a director’s creative vision, across multiple movies, can sometimes get a bit knotty when you are not viewing them in exact chronological order.) Because I actually thought the movie was OK, and more artistically stimulating than most. If it had been a first feature, it would have been exceptionally promising, and would likely have heralded the arrival of a major new talent.

So yeah, maybe ‘limp’ is not the correct word. But if I found the film a little flatter than the other three, perhaps is it because there were elements of tension present in Melancholia, Dogville and Breaking the Waves that are not present here- dangerous psychosexual explorations underpinned Dogville and Breaking the Waves, and though that was less prevalent in Melancholia, its central character was a misanthropic manic depressive who took perverse pleasure in the imminent demise of the entire world and everything in it, and was quite willing to say so. By contrast, Dancer in the Dark’s Selma- played surprisingly well by Björk in a beguiling performance that rides the line between assured and naïve- is simply a quiet, sweet woman who is polite to everyone and appears to have no sexual impulses at all. Roger Ebert uses the words ‘simpleminded’ and- with a qualifier- ‘retarded’ to describe her, and I don’t agree- though we are shown that she is a dreamer, a trait that renders her practically unable to perform her factory job, she also seems to be quite collected, certainly in comparison to Bess from Breaking the Waves, and although also possessed of a passivity that sometimes comes across childlike, I would posit that there is nothing overly wrong with this woman and, though undeniably eccentric, she is relatively normal.

Selma’s daydreams take the form of song-and-dance musical set-pieces featuring original songs. The songs were poor, in my opinion- simplistic, leaden and repetitive- and this may be due to an innate predisposition on my part against the musical genre in general; I made very similar comments when I was covering Leos Carax’s Annette, where the songs were provided by Sparks, a band who, like Björk, have had a stellar career and are highly beloved both critically and commercially. Maybe, for some reason, their music does not translate particularly well across this specific medium, and the skills one needs to write music for film are not the same skills one needs for the rock and pop charts, even for the kinds of restlessly creative, fiercely idiosyncratic acts like those that Sparks and Björk both are. The set-pieces also represent massive tonal shifts- not a huge problem, as you will get this sort of dynamic in daring cinematic works, and it is almost to be expected with von Trier, whose career sometimes seems as if it was built almost entirely on risk.

Either way, I thought it was all a bit of a mishmash, and ultimately I found it to be comfortably the least effective of the four von Trier movies I have discussed so far. The 1960s setting was pointless and added nothing. The excellent Peter Stormare did what he could with a role that was thin and underwritten. The tragic, melodramatic elements were handled with deliberate lack of moderation or nuance and it was pretty clear from an early stage that the film was going to be played out to its most upsetting, worst-case-scenario conclusion. Did the film have some interesting moments and ideas? Absolutely. Was it thought-provoking? Yes, of course, up to a point- I expect that every single one of von Trier’s movies, good, bad or indifferent, will meet this particular criterion. But overall, I wasn’t convinced by this one- it was passable, but I felt that its straining attempt at massive, crushing emotional impact did not land.

Nymphomaniac (Parts I & II) (2013)

I saw the five-and-a-half hour uncut version of Nymphomaniac, rather than the four-hour truncated version that was originally distributed when it was released. The very first thing I feel compelled to point out is that in this guise at least, it is far and away the most sexually explicit ‘mainstream’ film I have ever seen. Examples of other films that have real sex in them, such as Romance (Catherine Breillat, 1999), Intimacy (Patrice Chéreau, 2001) and 9 Songs (Michael Winterbottom, 2004), I haven’t seen, so I may be speaking somewhat from a position of ignorance. Nevertheless, I was astounded by the amount of sex that was in it- not the kind of sex that we see all the time in ‘normal’ films, but close-up after close-up of penises, both flaccid and erect. Close-up after close-up of vaginas. Close-ups of full penetration, including anal. Blowjob after blowjob, not shot from behind or anything, but with full, in-your-face mouth-to-penis contact.

Earlier, when reviewing Breaking the Waves, I wrote ‘In a von Trier film, sex is complicated and polyphonic- it can be enjoyable and alluring, whilst it can also be a potent whirlpool of psychological tension and threat. Our collective obsession with it, and fear of it in some cases, is ruthlessly exploited, and some viewers may then feel he has reduced it to a mere tool, wielded in a mercenary fashion, to elicit a decidedly cheap brand of shock and awe.’ It is somewhat logical, then, if von Trier makes at least one film that looks at sex in an utterly unrelenting manner, with apparently no restraint at all, and investigating absolute sex obsession- a person who puts sex first above anything else in her life, and continues on in this vein even when the knock-on effects have been absolutely dire, for herself just as much as anyone else. But for the first time watching von Trier, I felt like he was trying to provoke an appalled and disgusted reaction from me. Not just risking one, but actively trying to get one. If, for example, you’re not offended by its main character, Joe (female), proclaiming that ‘I discovered my cunt as a two-year-old’ (how she actually remembers that is anyone’s guess), then we have a scene where she recalls having her first orgasm at the age of 12, enacted in flashback by a child actress. If you’re not offended by that, then he gives you ‘the silent duck’. If you’re not offended by that, then we have the description of the ‘nutcracker’ abortion technique. If you’re not offended by that, then Joe poses the question, needlessly and with barely any context: ‘What was Hitler really, when it all boils down, other than a man to whom society gave free rein?’

It’s all just…too much. It’s too gleefully transgressive. Let me just reiterate again that there are five and a half hours of this- in a sense, not really a movie, more of a mini-series. My principal reaction, aside from offence, was weariness. All this stuff was just wearying, and it felt juvenile. It felt like having to spend time- a lot of time- with a teenager who was being really edgelord. It was fucking irritating. Supplementary to this was my strong belief that there was a better film, one lasting about two hours, lying dormant somewhere amongst this cavalcade of shock tactics, and that von Trier could have made that movie, and that he wilfully, consciously decided to make this one instead.

One wonders, then, why von Trier cannot do what every other director does and shoot implied sex scenes. Show breasts and pubic hair and full-frontal nudity if he wants to, like he did in Breaking the Waves. Why do we have to see the penises going in and out? I suppose the answer to that would be Why not? We’re all adults, so why not? Well, because it doesn’t feel necessary. How many erections and open vaginas do we really need to see? We all know what they look like, and the movie might have been better, more impactful, without them. Similarly, in a scene depicting a coat-hanger home abortion, why do we have to see the coat-hanger actually entering the vagina, and then footage from inside the body as the coat-hanger hooks into the foetus’s head, and why do we then have to see the foetus actually being dragged out, and all the bloody aftermath? My answer: we don’t, and von Trier is doing it to make a point. He is showing us that he has not been cowed by the 2011 Cannes controversy; that it has, if anything, emboldened him, and he will do whatever he likes and continue to piss off as many people as possible. That’s all well and good, I guess, but when he was already making movies that were sharp, astute and intellectually fulfilling, then there isn’t really any reason why he has to go harder, higher, and off-the-rails OTT. It gives the film a self-serving non-diegetic agenda that it doesn’t need. With the previous von Trier pieces I have reviewed, particularly Melancholia and Dogville, I felt that the director’s infamous defiance and iconoclastic spirit was channelled into cinema that fizzed and popped and crackled with creativity- partly at least because neither of those movies were a one-note exploration of sophomoric sex fixation and boundary-pushing.

I admit that there are other ways to look at Nymphomaniac, rather than just a constant stream of needlessly hardcore images and general ugliness. One way is as something of a coming-of-age story, documenting a woman’s life from childhood into her forties. As a very long-form piece, you could say that it is telling Joe’s story extremely closely, with much more depth and detail than you would get in a character study of more standard length. I would find this line of thinking more convincing if Joe felt like a real, living, breathing person rather than just some cipher for von Trier to hang transgressive points off. Her obsessive love for Jerome is not fleshed-out, as she seems to go from ambivalence toward him to being completely enraptured in an instant. Her masochistic tendencies come from nowhere- they’ve never been mentioned before, and when that section of the movie happens to be over, they’re never mentioned again, as if masochism is some sort of passing phase. Still, that subplot gives us a good look at her ripped, purple, bruised, battered ass after it has been whipped to shreds, so at least we get that out of it.

Another way to perceive the movie is as a further iteration on a theme I discussed when reviewing Steve McQueen’s Shame and Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream- that ‘addiction is a pig, and that by extension, life itself is kind of a pig too, but especially when you are struggling with these addictive tendancies which complicate everything and that, maddeningly, stop being pleasurable after a certain point’. It's a hypothesis which is very much in keeping with the movie’s crashingly downbeat tone, and it is in this guise that the film probably achieves its most measurable success- a sober, bleak drama about a person who is a slave to desire and can’t escape the incessant demands of her psyche. However, despite some mild lament that she is ‘not a good person’, Joe seems largely unflustered by her addiction and simply indulges it with an attitude of cool pragmatism and minimal regret, possibly mirroring the defiant mindset of von Trier himself. This is an offbeat, interesting dramatic decision, and could have resulted in some striking narrative fissures. However, Charlotte Gainsbourg’s zombie-like performance, which sees her intone absolutely all of her dialogue in a clipped, cool manner as if she’s reading from an instruction manual, stops us from relating much to this pathologically chilly woman, who can’t handle heartbreak and jealousy without stooping to attempted murder. Being an individualistic outsider is all well and good, but if you are the main character in a movie that is triple the typical length, it’s a good idea to have a few regular human qualities for an audience to latch on to, and to avoid saying things like ‘paedophiles should get medals’ (albeit with a ‘non-offending’ caveat).

I observed earlier that ‘There always seems to be at least one person in a von Trier film who is sensible and decent’, implying that, amongst other things, this element provides anchorage for the director’s more outlandish content. Where Nymphomaniac is concerned, this role is fulfilled for a while by Christian Slater’s father character, whose screentime is limited, and more prominently by Seligman, played by Stellan Skarsgård giving probably the best performance of the movie. Where this character is concerned (spoiler alert), von Trier decides to throw out hours and hours of carefully constructed characterisation to, again, make some point about how, deep down, we are all Hitler or we are all sex offenders or something. While it was in keeping with the film’s insistent cheerlessness, it also reinforced my impression that this piece was all over the place in terms of tone and timbre, and was quite willing to forego coherence in its overriding ambition to scandalise and appal.

I appreciated and even somewhat enjoyed the mixed feelings induced by the previous four movies I’ve reviewed by the director, and respected the challenges they put forth (even when, in the case of Dancer in the Dark, I didn’t particularly like the film much and didn’t feel it was all that successful in its aims). I have admired and praised his singular and uncompromising approach in the past, but in this instance I feel it has resulted in a contrived and undisciplined misfire. I just couldn’t get behind this one at all. Never mind. There will be other von Trier movies, and some of them I will like and some of them I won’t. This fell into the latter category.