This film ain’t for everybody; this review ain’t for everybody. So prudes, fuck off. Children, you may stay so long as you’re quiet and don’t ask questions.
Ok, so who’s up for a good dick montage? A montage-a-schlong, of you will. A dong patrol. An ass menagerie (sorry, I just had to throw that one in). An Order of the Phallus. I have to stop.
Allow me to describe a moment in Part II: on the left side of the screen, foreground, there’s an erect penis pointing center screen. On the right side, there’s also an erect penis pointing center screen, as if ready to duel the other. In each case, it’s more like 90% erect, so the dongs stick not up, but straight out for maximum horizontal projectile. Between the two engorged members in the background is a naked woman sitting on a bed with an increasingly non-plussed look on her face. She’s waiting for the the two naked men to stop arguing over which hole each gets to plunder. Yes, this happened.
This of course offers the fine distinction between art and pornography — unmarginalized double pentration = pornography. Naked, erect men arguing about double pentration without getting down to it = art. Of course, that’s bull, but hey, I do 
little more than try to identify the rules.
The DP argument is among the better moments in Nymphomaniac, Volumes I & II. One would guess that writer/director Lars von Trier intended this moment to be funny – it certainly seems funny. I wish I could say that; however, I cannot. I offer as evidence the fact that the director’s cut actually has the double penetration scene in full and the fact that Lars von Trier has the humor of your average house cat.
In Part I, I laughed out loud at a scene in which Uma Thurman – playing a jilted house wife – shows up at her husband’s lover’s apartment to wish him a “fond” farewell. She brings the kids along. “Would it be all right if I showed the children the whoring bed?” A moment like that is so over-the-top, it has to be tongue-in-cheek, right? Yeah, except the scene lasts another ten minutes thus proving if it’s a joke, it’s no longer funny. The coup-de-grace? The “heroine,” Joe (Lars von homie Charlotte Gainsbourg) is completely indifferent to the suffering she’s caused.
Nyphomaniac is told entirely in flashback. Local Samaritan (Stellan Skarsgård) finds Joe bloodied and wounded, passed out in a back alley. Like some sort of Father Theresa, he takes her in, offers her a bed and food and listens to her heartwarming history of unbridled personal lechery. It is not unlike a deathbed confessional, and there’s no question that von Trier has set us up to sympathize with Joe. Here she is suffering and insistent that karma is at play for her lifetime of evil. And we the audience react with, “no, no, dear. Let us hear your tale with sympathetic ear. We promise to think better of you.”
Well, I don’t.
And I don’t think better of this terrible film, either. Young Joe (Stacy Martin) is interested in her own pussy. She is, unfortunately, never not interested in her own pussy. That sounds like fun, but it gets old fast. From the moment she starts playing sex train bingo with her best friend, she begins a path of constant, joyless, caustic sexual … fulfillment? No. Conquest? No. Engrossment. Yes, engrossment. She is mesmerized by sex the way a couch potato is mesmerized by the combination of Cheetos and “Gilligan’s Island,” the only difference being there’s collateral damage when her pussy has a three-hour tour.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of metaphors to pace our heroine’s milieu. With helpful chapter titles and graphics, Joe’s naked recreation gets compared to fishing, Bach, mathematics, and both the devil and Jesus – Nymphomaniac alternatively suggests both extremes while settling on neither. For hours, I thought Nymphomaniac was making a statement about addiction and its controlling and destructive effect on life – but somewhere around Act XXIV, Joe chews out her support group, insists she’s different, and symbolically torches a car to boot. Oh, so this isn’t about addiction, huh? This is just a character study. Well, I kinda hate the character.
About this time, Lars saw fit to give us lectures on the wrongheadedness of political correctness – told while emphasizing with mild racism mind you, “I call a spade a spade.” Are these things not tasteless in your country? Because in ours, you’re sparking race riots. Eventually, this dissertation on the sexuality of people who make you sick to your stomach devolves into a curiously supportive statement for paedophlia. I’m thinking this really was time well spent. I think this might be my new Christmas time favorite 
film; It’s a Wonderful Life, get the fuck outta here.
With all the nudity and unabashed sexuality, you would think something would gain my fancy. You’d be wrong. The best orgasm happens with Gainesbourg tied up and bent over a couch rubbing her clitoris against a phone book while her exposed ass is brutally (as in red and bleeding) whipped by Jamie Bell. And, coincidentally, that’s exactly how I feel everytime an issue with AT&T comes up — except for the orgasm, of course.
Lars von Trier is one the truly unique and horrible talents of our day. “Fans” will recognize several stalwarts of the von Trier vonguard — uncompromising visuals, shitty camera work, and an obsessive need to toss a small child off a snowy balcony. Yet nothing says Lars von Trier quite like placing an actor in a scene he or she will never live down; Nymphomaniac has plenty of those. Early on, young Shia LaBeouf shows up to mishandle a mo-ped when teen Joe asks for a private ride — what follows is an unervingly awkward scene in which Shia enters, aloofly suggests Joe lose the knickers, strokes his exposed penis and then has intercourse the same way as one might approach whack-a-mole. Then he goes back to “fixing” his mo-ped. Don’t worry folks, there’s four hours of this crap; he’ll be back for even worse scenes later. Nymphomaniac hates Shia LaBeouf like few films have ever hated an actor before.
This is the kind of film curious jr. high boys sneak into … and then sneak out of, unimpressed. Oh yeah, there’s is wall-to-wall sex and plenty of nudity, but not an ounce of smile. I honestly don’t know what to do with you, Lars. No passion. No love. No arousal. Oops, I’m forgetting about the paedophile. My bad. You have reduced human sexual desire to a series of selfish, destructive indlugences devoid not only of positive
emotion, but of the carnal lustful reasons most people want to have sex — see a hot woman, oh boy! Where the Hell was that? I kind of feel sorry for you, or I would if I didn’t have to see this awful film and its OMG terrible climax.
Films like this are why the MPAA rates sex more harshly than violence. You have to know that NC-17 isn’t going to sell and hence I think Lars von Trier made this film as a great middle finger extended to the masses. It’s a film intended to shame prudes. It’s a film that says, “I dare you to critique my work, asexual assholes.” Well, Lars, I don’t doubt that your sexual avenues are wide and numerous; it is unfortunate, however, that your erotic Rome is a place where nobody wishes to have sex. Hence, I think you missed the point, not us.
Joe, without an ounce of remorse
Has a libido of unnatural force
And every kiss
Yields no bliss
All the nymphoma prevented intercourse
Rated NC-17 (Vol. I), Rated NCNC-46 (Vol. II), Vol. I: 117 Minutes Vol II: 123 Minutes
D: Lars von Trier
W: Lars von Trier
Genre: Sex, joyless sex.
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Lars von Trier
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Anybody excited based on the title
One afternote — I don’t think nearly enough has been made of the fact that this film was shown in two parts; why would anyone who saw Volume I pay for Volume II? That’s just cruel.
