Review: Nymphomaniac vol. 2

Picking up where the last volume left off, self-confessed nympho Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) continues telling her life story to the very curious Seligman (Stellan Skarsgaard). This time we hear about her excursions into S&M with Jamie Bell, and becoming a debt collector/bizarro torturer for Willem Dafoe.

 

Think it couldn’t get worse after “Vol. 1”? Oh how naïve you are then. Probably even more profanity than usual from me here, but believe me, it’s all warranted and in my view the correct vernacular to be used in this particular context (Not that I tend to use profanity just for its own sake anyway).

 

This 2013 Lars von Trier (“Dancer in the Dark”, “The Idiots”) film was formerly the back-end of a four hour opus of explicit pointlessness now separated into two unequally awful halves, the worst of which this most definitely is. More pretentious wankery from the Dogme specialist, this one even brings up references to Caligula and the Whore of Babylon for cryin’ out loud. That and a bunch of kinky and occasionally nastily violent sex combine to create…not a damn thing, really.

 

The problem with this shit can best be exemplified by the scene where two black dudes with admittedly impressive erect penises have an argument over who gets to stick it in whichever of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s holes, only to be interrupted by a verbal debate between Gainsbourg (still telling her story) and Stellan Skarsgaard on politically correct terminology for black people. I mean, go fuck yourself Lars, seriously. I was already tired of this woman well before the end of the first part, but it wasn’t long here before I was screaming for her to shut the hell up already. You are NOT special in any way, shape or form. You are NOT profound. You are an insufferably dull, insanely pretentious, and ear-bleedingly irritating mouthpiece for a filmmaker who doesn’t have nearly as much of a point as he probably thinks he does. The annoying thing…well one of them anyway, is that forget being one four-hour film or two two-hour films, this material easily could’ve been pared down into one far less painful two hour film. You can’t convince me that at least half of the ‘chapters’ in these two films aren’t needless filler.

 

There’s no doubt that this one’s the far worse of the two films. It’s not just bad, it’s spectacularly silly. S&M and that sort of thing always comes across as ridiculous to anyone not actually engaging in the activity themselves. And believe me, von Trier and Gainsbourg deserve public ridicule for this. It’s an embarrassing film, and Jamie Bell is embarrassingly miscast as an S&M guy. He’s laughably wrong for the part. Willem Dafoe…let’s just pretend you weren’t here, OK? But things get truly insane when out of nowhere, Gainsbourg gets into the debt-collecting business with a penchant for sexual torture. It’s here that the film unquestionably goes off the rails, if it had ever been anywhere near the track to begin with. But it’s pathetically silly having Gainsbourg tell people sexy stories to give them erections to expose their dirty little fetishes/sexual leanings. I mean, even if this is meant to be funny, it’s not. It’s embarrassing, though at least we’re told that the main actors don’t actually engage in any of the hardcore sex seen in the film (Though I’ve heard conflicting reports of either body doubles or CGI being used, which just muddies the waters a bit).

 

Gainsbourg’s character was never really likeable in the first film, but I found her utterly despicable in this film. She’s a horrid woman, albeit a horrid woman treated in a horrid fashion by others even more horrid than she. And von Trier himself is just as horrid for his unpleasant, juvenile, and heavy-handed vision, and then having the hide to try and gussy up this pointless filth with discussions on gender politics and bias at the end of the film. Perhaps the worst sin committed is when von Trier gives us in my view easily the least erotic lesbian sex scene of all-time. Those of you familiar with my particular tastes will realise how painful it is for me to say such a thing. How could von Trier take something so potentially beautiful and turn it into something off-putting? Believe me, he finds the one way to do it. He also caps things off with a truly disgusting ending, a cheap and cynical point that really wasn’t necessary at all.

 

Far worse than “Vol. 1”, this is the worst film of 2013 by a long shot, though both volumes have fared better with many critics than some of von Trier’s other efforts. So it could be partly a personal taste thing. Total waste of the bizarro Udo Kier as a colourless waiter, too. What the hell?

 

Rating: D-