Nymphomaniac: Volumes I & II (2013)

Warning: plot spoilers, extreme sexual content

There are some movies that simply should never have been made.
Somehow, this movie got made. Twice.
Both parts were released in 2013, so I’m just going to write one long screed against both.

It’s painfully obvious that director Lars Von Trier wanted to make a hard-core porno with all of his favorite and specific kinks, but didn’t want anyone to think he was a perv, so he made an “artsy” flick with those kinks instead.
Now, unfortunately, those films exist as a collective four hours of bland storytelling and lurching character development, inexplicably hosted on Netflix where anyone can suffer through them.

Seligman (Stellan Skarsgard) found Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) bloody and unconscious in an alley. She regained consciousness and asked that he not call the police, but that she would take his offer of his hospitality.
Back at Seligman’s apartment, Joe described herself to be a nymphomaniac. While that term has a frat-house connotation of a co-ed who likes to have sex, nymphomania is a legitimate mental disorder that’s related to things like OCD, in that there are uncontrollable urges, specifically of a sexual nature, which can have some truly detrimental real-life consequences.

The movies relayed Joe’s life, flashing back to her youth as young as the age of two, while Old Joe (from the present) narrated it all. It was, as the title suggests, about how she was a nymphomaniac and how she was convinced that her uncontrollable sexual drive was the source of all her suffering in life and that she was an evil person because of it.

And that’s where you should turn the movie off: ten minutes in.
As I lamented, there were another 230 minutes to slog through.
I should have turned it off; it absolutely didn’t deserve a full watch, but I was morbidly intrigued to see where it went.

Where it went was a bunch of penises.
Not just discussion of them, or displays of phallic objects. 
Actual penises.
I probably saw more penises with solo screen time in those four hours than I did in a decade of being an adult male with an unlimited internet connection.

Joe described approximately 30 years of her bizarre sexual exploits: everything from learning how to masturbate to learning how to bait guys on trains.
At one point, relatively early on, she noted that Seligman kept trying to tie her actions to behaviors that wild animals display, instead of getting aroused like other guys to whom she’s relayed her story. Seligman admitted that he’d never had sex and was thoroughly asexual.
As she relayed her carnal adventures, it was clear that everything she did, with everyone and in every situation, was consensual. At one point, she was in a scenario where her boss wanted to take advantage of her subordinate employee status and she easily cock-blocked him. So consent was clear in this movie, though never explicitly stated, and that’s just about the only thing they got right.
Joe’s stories didn’t just discuss sexual endeavors - they were displayed on screen. We saw Old Joe and Young Joe (Stacey Martin, age 22 when this was made) commit many sexual acts, most of which included blowjobs, and were shown/filmed in such a way that I have to wonder if the actresses were actually committing full-on fellatio on set. 
The vaginal sex scenes were pretty graphic too, as I’m pretty sure both actresses also had regular penetrative sex on camera.
All of the sex scenes were disgustingly realistic, as if you were watching the sex tape that your aggressively below-average neighbors shot with their phone, and as much fun as having them sit on the couch with you and constantly ask for your approval while they rewound their favorite parts for the N-th time.
I’m keenly aware that real sex isn’t like porn; that doesn’t mean I want to watch “real people” have gross, normal-people sex simply because “it’s more authentic.”

I would like to take a moment to point out that Stacey Martin was a terrible casting choice to play a young version of Charlotte Gainsbourg, as the two look nothing alike - short of both of them being white women with brown hair - and the transition between the two actresses in the flashbacks was stunningly bad; it felt like we’d missed some key point in the story-telling events.

A few scenes also showed Young Joe with her Dad (Christian Slater). Unfortunately for Christian Slater, he looks kinda creepy, so in a movie all about twisted sexual acts, I was expecting to see Dad molest Joe.
Instead, he died and shit himself.
We saw that in graphic detail too.

At one point, for some stupidly contrived reason, Joe decided to get herself a Dominant, as part of a spontaneous BDSM (Bondage, Discipline, Sadism, and Masochism) interest. Like “Fifty Shades of Gray” (2015), this movie did not display BDSM properly: find any forum, interview, or “how to” for BDSM and you’ll learn that it’s all about a very particular type of sexual need and fulfillment, complete with aftercare, safewords, and necessary maturity. 
It’s absolutely not just about one person beating up another person while orgasming.
Can you guess which version this movie showed?
So we saw Old Joe get beaten up by a thoroughly unqualified Dom. 
Like the sex scenes, I’m pretty sure the actress actually got whipped and bloodied on set. Otherwise, they had the most extreme prosthetic butt I’ve ever seen in my life.

Somewhere after that, Old Joe decided to get herself a job as a bounty hunter/repo-woman for the mob, in a transition that made about as much sense as anything else in this bloated mess, and somehow used her experience as a Submissive to hunt down people and violently demand they pay their debts.
To make matters even more confusing, this is when Joe got an apprentice: a thoroughly screwed up teen girl who was only ever referred to as “P” (Mia Goth, age 20 when this was made), who inexplicably turned against Joe and went to be a Jerome’s new lover.
P also decided to have sex with Joe at one point, apropos of nothing, because of course she did.

Last character intro here: Jerome (Shia LeBouf/Michael Pas) was Joe’s first love/husband/ex who was frustratingly and percussively present, only ever existing to drive the plot forward and be mad at her.
We got to see LeBouf’s penis; I have no idea what Pas’s penis looks like.
I hate that that’s a sentence I had to write.

And here’s the icing on the crap-cake that we’ve been choking down:
At the very, very end, after Joe had finished her story, she declared that she wanted to be done with sex: she decided she was done letting it run her life and wanted to get to live something vaguely normal. Seligman nodded in approval and left the room, and Joe turned off the lamp. Had we cut to credits right there, that would have been an acceptable ending.
But no.
Seligman, an avowed asexual, then waltzed back into the room, jerking off, removed the covers, and attempted to rape Joe. When she asked him what the hell he was doing, he said “C’mon, you’ve had sex with thousands of guys.”
Then the screen cut to black and she shot him.

Seriously, Lars Von Trier?! This whole movie was about a woman taking charge of her aggressively over-active sexuality, talking to a man who declared he had no interest in sex. That’s not “deep” or “thought-provoking,” or some haughty commentary on society’s view of women.
That was shitty storytelling, plain and simple.

This movie only avoided a hard “X” rating by coming out as “Not Rated.”
Saying that I was uncomfortable while watching this is a drastic understatement: I would have rather had to teach sex-ed to my boss.
And the end, which could have been good had Trier not decided to burn down his own creation, made me angry.
I’m fine with a movie that leaves me with any particular emotion as it ends, if that’s what the story has been building to. I’m not fine with an ending that’s so far out of left field that it feels like it was ripped from an entirely separate film.
I haven’t been so mad during the end credits since I saw Johnny Depp’s idiotic “Transcendence” (2014).
At four hours, this whole thing was made worse by scenes that went on unnecessarily long, with were presumably “artsy” shots or “emotional” interactions that did nothing but drag the movies out.
These get officially get 1 Claw, since I sat through the whole damn dyad, but unofficially I’m giving them a -1 Claw for being a thinly-veiled fetish flick with a shit-show conclusion. 
I want 240 minutes of my life back and my memory purged.