Nymphomaniac Vols I & II – review | Mark Kermode

Watching Nymphomaniac raises several thorny questions. How seriously should we take Lars von Trier? Is there a difference between art and porn? Does it need to be this long? Do we really have to use that brackety/vulva (Nymph( )maniac) title gag? And, most pressingly, what the hell is up with Shia LaBeouf's accent? With his ear-scraping mockerney shtick, LaBeouf sounds like he's auditioning for a twisted biopic of Dick Van Dyke. Those seeking something genuinely shocking need look no further; if movies were rated for scenes of gratuitous violence against vowels, Nymphomaniac would never have made it past the censors.

Redacted from a reportedly more explicit and even more unwieldy director's cut, Von Trier's latest arrives in UK cinemas in two volumes, divided into five and three chapters respectively, mirroring the number of front and back thrusts with which our heroine, Joe, abandons her virginity. Through episodic flashback we see Joe (variously played by newcomer Stacy Martin and long-term Von Trier muse Charlotte Gainsbourg) exploring the extent of her voracious and increasingly self-destructive sexual appetite; from youthful masturbation (replete with levitating sacrilegious visions), through adolescent promiscuity, to middle-aged flagellation and beyond.

Offered shelter by the avowedly asexual Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård) after being found half-dead in an alleyway, Joe recounts her self-proclaimed wickedness as a series of Scheherazade-like tales of misadventure, leading us through the long, dark night of her soul and on into morning. Seligman is intellectual and ascetic, constantly transposing these fleshy tales into forgivingly abstract digressions (fly fishing, knot-tying, Fibonacci numbers); Joe is earthy and unapologetic, insisting upon lustful damnation, sneeringly rejecting the psychobabble term "sex addict" for the film's proud titular label: "I am a nymphomaniac!"

Pitched somewhere between the metaphysical porno of Gerard Damiano's The Devil in Miss Jones and the softcore breast-beating of Just Jaeckin's The Story of O, Von Trier's still unspooling magnum opus is an exhausting orgy of heady ideas and groiny spectacle that veers wildly between the profound, the comic and the ridiculous – not always intentionally (a dopey shaggy-dog punchline almost proves its undoing).

Channelling De Sade and Baudelaire via the sex-quest cinema of the 1970s (the spatial/temporal setting is uncertain, but early scenes evoke the Two Ronnies jokes about "Have-It-Awayday" British Rail tickets), Lars and his unreal girls pick away at the psycho-societal scab of la petite mort, with the loss of Joe's orgasmic power at the end of Vol I leading to violence, misery and melodrama.

Throughout, the consummate agent provoc-auteur remains torn between an angsty interest in self-obliteration and an adolescent obsession with the illusory mechanics of hardcore – a fetish that dates back to the days of The Idiots, and which has made porn doubles and prosthetic genitals a recurrent element of his arthouse palette.

As with so many of Von Trier's films, Nymphomaniac's recurrent tropes spill over the sides of a single/double feature into a loose thematic triptych. Thus, after the Europa, Golden Heart, and (unfinished) USA: Land of Opportunities trilogies comes Depression, of which this is presumably the flailing final act. Lacking the insane focus of Antichrist or the "double-cream" sentiment of Melancholia, Nymphomaniac opts instead for rambling anti-erotic satire (as Skarsgård says: "You can't wank to it"), its deadpan tone defined by the hollow monotone drone of Joe's voice that sounds on occasion like Histoire de Juliette ou les prospérités du vice as read by the Speaking C(l)ock. Here, the shrieking is left to others, most notably Uma Thurman in a horribly tragicomic cameo as the wronged wife of one of Joe's multiple lovers who demands, with crazed politeness, to be allowed to show her children "the whoring bed". As for Joe, she gets to reprise the central maternal neglect/sexual obsession set piece from Antichrist, as Von Trier worries away at the age-old mother/whore dichotomy that continues to give him sleepless nights.

Whether such material explores or exploits misogyny will remain a matter of debate, but whatever Von Trier's own hang-ups, the supremely self-possessed Gainsbourg always seems to be in control. Even during scenes of flesh-ripping S&M (Jamie Bell is remarkable as the icily dominant K), Joe's abnegation is a world away from the leering depiction of Bess McNeill in Breaking the Waves, which remains both Von Trier's most loved and most loathsome movie.

Having theatrically taped his own mouth shut, Von Trier challenges/dares his audience to accuse him of any number of "isms" (most notably racism, during the failed threesome sequence so prominently displayed in publicity material) with the pranksterish glee of one who got "FUCK" tattooed across his knuckles not as a teenager, but as a man in his 50s who really should know better. That he doesn't is part of his appeal.

With its wildly absurdist obscenities, fearlessly bold performances and wilfully indulgent lack of structure, Nymphomaniac provokes the now familiar symphony of sighs, gasps and laughs. Amid the chaos, only LaBeouf really comes unstuck, fatally miscast as the object of Joe's true affections. In a film not short on alarming protuberances, it's Shia who sticks out like a sore thumb, a bum note in the cacophony of discordant excess.