Nymphomaniac: Extended Director's Cut (2014)

I've seen Gone With The Wind and I’ve seen The Chelsea Girls, but this easily takes the cake. Barring an unexpected screening of The Clock, Shoah or Berlin Alexanderplatz this will easily go down as my longest theatrical experience. Sure I've marathoned an entire TV series in a just over a day, but this is another matter. This is five and a half hours in the dark, alone, with no cell phone. Some films you can watch passively while doing errands around the house. A Lars Von Trier film is not one of those kinds of films. Undertaking Nymphomaniac in a theater rather than at home, on demand requires five and a half hours of actively giving your attention to one thing. But is it worth it?

Though the most extensive addition in this new version of the film is a graphic depiction and thought provoking discussion of abortion, I feel that the most important addition is that of Von Trier himself on the film's poster. This, along with the deliberate inclusion of a shot where the camera crew is reflected in a mirror, only helps to further my feeling that above all else this is a film about Lars Von Trier and his life in cinema. Substitute the word sex with cinema and you could easily re-title the film Cinephile.

The only real "new thought" I had on this go-around was contemplating whether the "next generation" represented by the character of P was meant as a stand-in for any young filmmaker in particular. But seeing as that thought could just as easily have come from a re-watch of the original cut of Vol. II, it's nothing really to write home about. If you saw the original two-volume incarnation, you didn't really miss much. Still overall a fascinating film worth chewing on.

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Not everyone can be Martin Scorsese. By this I mean that in the current filmmaking climate, it is extremely difficult for a director to find the proper budget to realize a project of any significant scope. Some auteurs like Brian De Palma and David Cronenberg have had to resort to making small movies where the lack of budget is plainly visible in the so-so effects and underpopulated crowd scenes. They seem to understand that most people will not be seeing these films in a theater and have adjusted to a more TV-friendly aesthetic. David Lynch and John Waters aren’t even able to drum up budgets at all. But thankfully there’s Lars Von Trier.

While everyone else is getting smaller and smaller, the man who made two films where the sets were merely outlines on the ground, has opted to get bigger and bigger. Beginning with Antichrist and continuing with Melancholia, Von Trier started implementing what he has referred to as his, “monumental style”. This style consists of extremely precise, high definition, slow motion photography that runs contrary to the more handheld, run and gun style he was known for in the 90's. But like Miles Davis at his height, once you've perfected something, it's time to move on and try something new.

Though he seems to have abandoned the, “monumental style” for Nymphomaniac, Lars has miraculously found a way to get even bigger by putting together a two-part, four-hour, widescreen epic, with all sorts of visual tricks, a huge cast and explicitly graphic sexuality. He even implemented the head-replacement technology that David Fincher pioneered in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and The Social Network to make it seem as though the movie stars onscreen are actually copulating with one another. So what if the majority of viewers will be watching this on flat screens, in the privacy of their own home? Lars doesn’t care. He’s put everything he has into this funny, sad, erotic and thought provoking magnum opus. He’s attempting to fill all of your (aesthetic and emotional) holes, and for the most part he’s successful.

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More than any other filmmaker I know, Lars Von Trier loves to work in trilogies. There's the Europa Trilogy (Element of Crime, Epidemic and Europa) The Golden Heart Trilogy (Breaking the Waves, The Idiots and Dancer in the Dark) and the incomplete USA: Land of Opportunities trilogy (Dogville, Manderlay and the un-produced Washington). Nyphomaniac has been described as the culmination of a Depression Trilogy following the director's well publicized 2007 breakdown. Yet, while the other films of this trilogy (Antichrist and Melancholia) are content to wallow in the morose muck of a depressed state, Nymphomaniac seems to be about emerging from that mire via perverse humor and playful provocations.

After his breakdown, Lars was quite literally Joe, laying bruised and beaten in some forgotten alleyway. Fortunately audiences/critics were there to play Seligman and sympathetically listen to his tales of woe (ie: the other films in the trilogy). At first Lars/Joe was receptive to our kindness, but gradually he came to resent us for it and started to kick back against the compassion with tiny verbal barbs and cinematic provocation. By the end of Volume II we have a fully recuperated Lars Von Trier who is back in fighting form and itching to bite the hand that feeds...even if it kind of shoots his own film in the foot. So then why do it you ask? I guess the best way to describe that is with a Seligman-esque digression:

A scorpion asks a frog to carry him across a river. The frog is reluctant as he fears the scorpion will sting him during the trip. The scorpion argues that if it stung the frog, they would both sink and drown. Reluctantly the frog agrees, but midway across the river the scorpion does indeed sting the frog, dooming them both. When the frog asks, "Why?" the scorpion can only reply, "It's my nature!"