There’s a rare moment of quiet grace late in Lars von Trier’s 5-hour psychological epic, Nymphomaniac. After the dark night of soulful storytelling the sunrise appears in a small patch of light on the brick alley wall behind Seligman’s (Stellan Skarsgard) house. Perhaps caused by a reflection off unseen windows, it’s still magic. It emblematizes a hope, an improbable radiance on earth, perhaps even the prospect of redemption in one of the harshest visions in cinema.
It seems all the brighter after we’ve learned how Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) came to be abandoned beaten and befouled outside Seligman’s flat. She was betrayed by her one true love Jerome (Shia LaBoeuf) and P (Mia Goth, and she will), the young girl she saved and adopted as ward and successor. But that light is brief. The film ends in a mutual betrayal, unseen in the darkness that has resumed its pervasive hold.
That final act, heard but not seen, proves profoundly ambivalent because it marks the conversion of both central characters. Throughout the narrative, as Joe recounts her life story of sexual impulses unbridled and destructive, Seligman appears her saintly opposite. He is a man of culture and knowledge. Jewish, he is of the people of the word. The 16-volume OED anchors his shelf as his intellectual hunger does his self. He explains Joe’s apparently impulsive behaviour by finding abstruse parallels in fishing, science, mathematics, music. A celibate, he represents the life of the mind. Even more important is his unflagging forgiveness, his finding a positive aspect to Joe’s every humiliating confession. Seligman is literally “the happy man” because he is blessed with humanity. Indeed, for a brilliant reading of the film as a defence of Jewish philosophy see
But in that last scene the saint proves only human. Having resisted sexuality all his life he is unintentionally seduced by Joe’s revelation of the life he denied. She doesn’t make that life appealing, but she jars him into an awareness of it. Worse, his assault comes hard upon his defence of her entire sexual career as a woman’s assertion of her rights against the dominant male order. Then he practices what he preached against.
In rejecting her samaritan’s unexpected approach Joe shows she has finally transcended her sexuality. Telling her story and receiving Seligman’s understanding have given Joe a new self-respect and the courage to be abstinent. No more is her sexuality a compelling shame: “Mea vulva. Mea maxima vulva.” That she kills him reaffirms the moral and emotional complexity of the human condition. She couldn’t kill her ex-lover for seducing her ward but when she kills Seligman she expresses her despair that even this good man is as hypocritical as the society she has shunned. Shorn of his pretence to detachment, his soul is now as bared as the winter tree. Earlier Joe said her “only sin” was that she “demanded more from the sunset.” The sunrise finds her demanding more from her saint -- but getting abominably, humanly, less. As if to celebrate her character's ascension Ms Gainsbourg sings a bluesy "Hey Joe" over the end credits.
This is the most astonishing and compelling film of the last 10 years. It’s the film John Donne would make if he were alive in the film age. Every scene ripples with the tension between the body and the soul, the flesh and the spirit, the profane and the sacred. “Fill all my holes” speaks to Joe’s spiritual void as much as to her physical cavities. For Joe to transcend she has to move from her absolute numbness at the intermission through forms of self-flagellation, her assault upon the flesh, through her lay confession to emerge absolved. True to Donne’s spirit, the film has moments of brilliant black comedy. And the crowning glorious punchline: to save herself she has to kill her fallen saint.
This is also the perfect First Date film. The graphic sex is an ice-breaker. You'll slip into at least conversational intimacy sooner than a dozen candlelight dinners and beachside walks. If the girl is offended by Joe’s activity, hey, remind her of all the penes for once on view too. This is that rare mainstream film with equal opportunity sexual spectacle. Besides, unless you really mess up, Part 2 virtually guarantees a second date, just to find whodunitandhow next?.
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