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| Edited By: Pradeep Menon |Source: DNA |Updated: Dec 01, 2014, 10:55 AM IST
Lars von Trier has always effortlessly shocked the audience. Be it with his choice of themes, his fascination with the feminine, or his unabashed portrayal of graphic sex and violence - his films have never been for the squeamish or the faint at heart.
His latest film, Nymphomaniac, is a two-part magnum opus whose unedited 'director's cut' runs to over five-and-a-half hours in total. It begins innocuously enough, when an aging man discovers an injured, semi-conscious woman lying on a street. He takes her home, helps her clean up, and then the two begin talking.
What follows is one immense conversation that chronicles the tumultuous sex life of Joe, the woman in question; right from her adolescent years, all the way to the moment where she ended up on that street in the middle of the night. Volume One of the film ends with a neat little twist that sets up Volume Two nicely, but the two films are essentially one film, which seem to be split up mainly in the interest of time.
The majestic conversation, that's ostensibly about sex, is actually about almost everything that ails the human psyche today. There's gender and feminist discourse (von Trier, undoubtedly, is a bit of a feminist himself), there's religion, race, motherhood, abortion; and so much more. As he hears more about Joe's sexual capers, the man, a bibliophile, draws parallels with music, mathematics, language, art and almost anything he deems fit.
The film is held together by two terrific, anchoring performances by Stellan Skarsgård and Charlotte Gainsbourg. The latter, in particular, a regular face in von Trier's films, submits herself to the complex role of the oldest Joe in the most inconceivable way. A younger Joe is played by the pretty Stacy Martin, who does a fair job. Watch out, also, for a terrific little cameo by Uma Thurman as a loony wife of one of Joe's many thousand sexual partners.
Lars von Trier is clearly operating at multiple levels in Nymphomaniac. On the one hand, there's the literary aspect of the film. Sex, the most primal of human needs after food, is taboo for reasons unknown. The grotesqueries of human nature, with regards to sex or any taboo subject, can be succinctly summed up in one word: hypocrisy.
Lars von Trier continuously exposes this directly and indirectly, as he deconstructs and hacks away at notions of sexual deviation, repressed sexual desire, masochism and suchlike. In essence, Lars von Trier has put together a compendium of sorts, on why humankind has dug itself into the massive hole it often seems to find itself in (pun unintended). Incidentally, the climax of the film is perhaps the single greatest statement on the sexual freedom of women, that has ever been made in cinema.
Then, there's the technical aspect of the film. It's been nearly two decades since von Trier, with fellow Danish director Thomas Vinterburg, co-authored the rules of the Dogme 95 movement. It imposed strict rules on the technical treatment of films, aimed at showing the finger to conventional, commercial big-budget cinema.
While both directors have since gone on to outgrow their own movement, vestiges of the style can still be seen in von Trier's work. He still keeps it minimalist, avoids music as much as he can, limits the use of lighting and prefers the use of handheld camera. In Nymphomaniac, he literally toys with the accepted grammar and rules of cinema. Joe narrates her story in chapters, but the chapters themselves are almost always non-linear.
Lars von Trier seems to derive great joy in making the audience restless and uneasy, and he does it in multiple ways - either directly, with the use of lurid and graphic detail, or subtly, by simply blacking out the screen for an extended period of time, long enough for the audience to wonder if there's something wrong with the print of the film. At one point you even see the camera being operated in a mirror, and you know instantly that this was on purpose, to jolt the audience in and out of the insane, mesmerising world that they've been drawn into.
This penchant that von Trier has, of upsetting the apple cart, of pushing the envelope, of taking cinema to hitherto uncharted territories, of always being able to inflict an intellectual concussion on the keen cinematic mind, is what sets him apart as a film-maker. Only a fraction of the colossal, immeasurable power of cinema has been harnessed thus far, and von Trier is one of the few who continuously seek to change the paradigm.
Ironically, that's also what limits a masterpiece like Nymphomaniac; because intellectually, emotionally and visually, the film just isn't for everyone. Those, however, who see what von Trier is trying to show them, will walk away from the film with an indescribable feeling of numbness.
