Half a dozen years ago I watched Lars von Trier’s Melancholia.  It’s not my favorite.  I’ve only seen it the once (though I did go back and take another look at the beginning) and as I recall it was kind of slow.  But rarely has a day gone by in the past six years when I haven’t thought about it.  I try to learn as little as possible about the films on my to-watch list, and to forget what I do learn⁠—usually a pretty easy task for me these days.  But thanks to Melancholia, when I found out that this was the next von Trier, I couldn’t forget that.  As it very slowly moved up the list, I’d think, all right, three more movies till I get to the von Trier.  And then when I got to it, I had to put it off for a bit, because it’s 5½ hours long and I needed to clear the time.  This past week was the week of the AP Literature exam, so I gave my kids a break from their distance learning assignments and took advantage of that break to watch this.

It took longer than 5½ hours.  Watching this film felt a lot like reading a literary novel, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment, and reading a novel would be a nightmare if the pages kept turning at their own pace, not giving you a chance to pause and reflect on what you’ve just read.  I stopped going to movie theaters back in the ’00s because of phones, but even if phones were not an issue, I would still find it hard to go back because a movie theater seat doesn’t come with a pause button.  (Of course, this is now academic as the only movie theater seats currently available are in the cars at the drive-in.)  The premise of Nymphomaniac is that a monkish older man finds a beaten woman lying on the pavement and takes her back to his austere apartment to recover.  He asks her what happened.  She says the beating was her own fault for being a bad human being.  He replies that he doesn’t believe anyone is truly bad, and to prove her point, she tells him her life story.  So that’s one reason this feels like a novel: a 5½-hour film is much better able to contain an account of a life than a standard 1½-hour biopic.  The fact that her account is divided up into eight discrete chapters adds to the literary effect.  And then there’s the central gimmick.  As the title of the movie suggests, the woman turns out to be a sexual compulsive; since her teens, she has regularly had sex with perhaps ten men a day, making for a body count that runs into the thousands.  But the man who takes her in, who turns out to be a very well-read 60-year-old virgin, can only relate to these stories intellectually, so as she talks about the fixes her lifestyle has gotten her into over the years, he draws extended parallels to his own pursuits: fly-fishing, mathematics (the Fibonacci sequence gets multiple shout-outs), baroque music theory.  The result is like a smut novel generated by a neural network that had trained on Gödel, Escher, Bach.  That’s not too dissimilar from some novels I’ve read; heck, Lolita is to a great extent about a narrator frantically trying to recast holding a sex slave as an intellectual game.  Finally, there’s the simple fact that, as recommended by Pattern 26, Nymphomaniac isn’t coy about presenting its material.  For ages, books have taken advantage of the abstraction of language to graphically describe things that films would only hint at.  Nymphomaniac does more than hint.  This is one of the few films about sex to actually show penises entering vaginas (using computer graphics and prostheses).  As many reviewers have pointed out, these scenes are neither erotic nor meant to be.  But neither are they particularly shocking, at least not to anyone who has had sex and therefore seen such sights in real life.  They’re matter-of-fact.  At least, in the first half they’re matter-of-fact.  In the second half the movie does aim for shock value, as when the woman gives herself an on-screen coat-hanger abortion, and the conversations in the frame story turn from intellectual counterpoint to a direct discussion of sexual politics which is clearly meant to be equally provocative.  Nymphomaniac thus ends up becoming the cinematic equivalent of one of Douglas Adams’s flight schools, which “hire people with surprising bodies or opinions to leap out from behind bushes and exhibit and/or explain them at the critical moments”.

Because the movie is 5½ hours long, these two halves were released theatrically as separate films.  Mainstream reviewers tended to rate the films very similarly, with a slight edge given to the second half.  This stands in stark contrast to the Internet movie-geek consensus, which was that “Volume I” was very promising and that “Volume II” was a shitshow.  One commenter on Letterboxd remarked that “The nosedive between parts one and two is simply astounding”, and I didn’t see too much in the way of disagreement.  The Skandies voters placed “Volume I” at #17 for the year and “Volume II” at #58.  And I have to go with the geeks on this one.  When I finished “Volume I”, I was thinking I might give it something in the 12-13 range in my scoring system, signifying a very good film.  Then came “Volume II”, and halfway through that I was thinking it might score maybe a 3 or a 4.  All the sex in Nymphomanic was squicky to me, but the first half of “Volume II” trades in squicky sex for outright torture, which I cannot abide.  And the disappearance of the counterpoint meant that there was really no break from this interminable sequence that was both excruciating and excruciatingly dull: what is less interesting than someone else’s kink?  So, no pausing here⁠—by this point I just wanted to power through it and see whether a later chapter might relieve the disappointment, and the final hour of the film is indeed not quite as bad.  I guess that on balance I might give “Volume I” a 13 and “Volume II” a 5, with an unbalanced average bringing the total to an 8.  But I would probably pick those because they’re all Fibonacci numbers.

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