TBS and a Great Controversial film (Nymphomaniac)
Last Thursday night I went to see one of my favorite bands, Taking Back Sunday, for, I believe the 5th time since I discovered them amidst the emerging emo scene back in 2001. They always put on a high energy show, but this time around I think their age was finally catching up with them, although, yes, their music lends itself to high energy. Regardless, the show was a great time and they even played a couple of songs they haven't been playing, since I believe this was their first solo-headlining show on their tour, because they've been splitting the bill with the Used, another like-minded emo band from the heyday of emo. I would have liked to hear a few of my other favorite songs, but they've been on tour promoting their new album, which can suffice. When I saw them last year, they were celebrating the 10th anniversary of their first album, "Tell All Your Friends" which they played in its entirety (I believe I have a post of it somewhere in this mess). But, anyway, here is their setlist:
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"Nymphomaniac Volumes 1 and 2"
starring: Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgard, Stacy Martin, Shia LaBeouf, Christian Slater, Uma Thurman, Sophie Kennedy Clark, Connie Nelson, Jamie Bell, Willem Dafoe, Mia Goth, Jean-Marc Barr, Michael Pas
written and directed by: Lars von Trier
I thoroughly enjoyed Lars von Trier's brand new film, and not just because it's filled with lots of nudity and sex, or because its existence bred extreme controversy and critics and naysayers. No, I enjoyed it because, as a film, it is truly a piece of art. Lengthy, yes. But, in order to tell the story completely, there really isn't much wasted, unnecessary time filled in. It's an outrageous and provocative film, you cannot deny it that, even though it is also very self-indulgent, but then again, isn't the act of sex also rather self-indulgent, if not, at least it's self-gratifying. His film attempts to see and examine sex through the eyes of a damaged woman who has openly attempted to making it her mission in life to remove the whole idea of "love" from sex, in our love-fixated society.
"Love is blind. No, it's worse. It distorts something. It's something I never asked for," says Joe, rather plainly at one point during her diatribe to Seligman.
The film is not necessary about sex. It's not even about waxing philosophical (about sex). The two main characters, Joe (played by Charlotte Gainsbourg) and Seligman (played by Stellan Skarsgaard), are supposed to represent those two parts. "Nymphomaniac" is essentially about how silly sex can actually be and how silly it can make us. I know that seems like a bizarre take on such subject matter, because, yes, sex is heavy and deep and carries with it a lifetime of consequences.
Lars von Trier seems to know exactly how to tackle the subject, by making it fascinating, engaging, and quite frankly often didactic or edifying for the viewer. Joe represents the grim tone and bleak outcome of the film, since she is engaging in a long monologue of her life's story as it relates to her sexual journey. The flashbacks often come off as playful, fun, and entertaining.
Charlotte Gainsbourg plays the androgynously named Joe, who, at the opening of Volume I, is discovered lying bruised and battered in a dark alley by Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård). Seligman takes her in, tucks her in bed, and gives her tea. He is a complete stranger and he asks what happened. She warns him up front that it will not be a nice story, that she is a bad person. He assures her that nothing she tells him will shock him. He thinks she may be being too hard on herself. There's something almost unfinished about Joe, a flat affect, as she insists that her behavior has been beyond-the-pale. As the rain pours down, she tells him her story.
The first Volume belongs to the beautiful, young, unknown actress that plays Joe as a young woman, beginning her sexual journey of self discovery. This actress is Stacy Martin. And she is perfection.
In the flashback sections of Volume I, the young Joe is played by Stacy Martin, being raised by a "cold bitch" of a mother, and a kindly doctor father (Christian Slater) who passes on to his daughter a love of flora and fauna. She discovers early on that when she touches herself between her legs, she gets what she calls "the sensation". Joe views her virginity as something that needs to be gotten rid of pronto, so she hits up a local rough-around-the-edges mechanic named Jerome (Shia LaBeouf) to do the deed; he complies with very little ceremony and no preamble. Jerome keeps entering the film, through various hard-to-believe coincidences. The mechanic somehow is transformed into a pencil-pushing office manager. When Jerome re-appears for the third time, Seligman, still listening, calls Joe on embellishing the story. This is sounding fictional now, cries Seligman. She must be making this up!
Young Joe, once she lost her virginity, starts her quest to have as much sex as she possibly can. Her partner-in-crime for this is a young friend who is even more daring, and who comes up with various sexual competitions. They board a train and keep a running tally of how many conquests they can each make over the course of the night. Joe is amazed to discover how easy it is. She tells Seligman of her learning curve, the tactics and strategies she used as she worked that train. Every man is different. She is cold and calculating about it, and the scene really captures the restlessness and kamikaze bravery of young girls first trying out their sexual powers without knowing at all what they are doing. "Nymphomaniac" does not judge Young Joe and her friend. The only person judging Young Joe is the mature Joe, wrapped up in blankets, telling Seligman the story.
What's great about "Nymphomaniac" as a story is that it does not make the mistake of pretending to be a story of redemption or of trauma. That would be too easy. Instead, the message Joe is trying to say is that sex feels good all on its own. Sex is its own reward. Sex isn't something we should be afraid of experiencing and talking about.
Seligman sometimes misses the point of Joe's narrative, musing about how addiction can dull a person's moral apparatus. Joe wants to make sure she is perfectly clear with him: She embraced sex because of the "sensation" it provided her. The power she had over men was secondary. She loves lust, and her lust makes her heartless. Well, it's a heartless world. Joe sees herself as an outlaw, taking charge of her own hunger
The first Volume ends on Joe's tragic note, of having somehow lost her ability to climax or feel an orgasm, which forces her to confront the painful crossroad in her life of her sexual philosophy.
And then Volume Two picks up and I think many film critics have dismissed Volume Two as simply von Trier going all self-indulgent and pretentious, but I think they've sort of missed the point and the connection between both films (which I saw back to back which I think helps). Sure, Volume Two is a lot more focused on the pain and suffering Joe endures, but it's all necessary to her end-journey and self-discovery.
Having discovered the constraint of love (i.e. that real love is about the concern for someone other than herself), Joe proceeds to embark on a series of painful misadventures that pull her deeper into the world of anonymous sex, with an added emphasis on self-objectification and brutal sadomasochism, which are implicatively intended to cast her capacity for love out of her body. And there is a lot of self-loathing embedded in Joe's character. Said loathing is most pronounced in the chain of encounters that serve as Volume II's centerpiece. Joe eventually arranges to meet K (Jamie Bell), a sadist, who, pointedly and tellingly, always has a long line of grateful, bored housewives in his reception room awaiting his demeaning brutalization. After a series of implied negotiations, K ties Joe up to a couch, props her rump up in the air just so, and proceeds to administer beatings that grow so awful as to earn their inevitable comparison to the 40 Roman lashings administered to Jesus.
In Volume Two we also meet Joe's protege in the job she undertakes as a debt collector. This relationship has interesting, albeit, foreseeable outcomes. I won't get into much of it here, because it's the build up to the climax of the film and I don't want to spoil everything, but this story worked on many levels for me. I'll only say that Joe loses a lot by the end of the film, but, she really needs to for the story to work.
I really enjoyed and understood von Trier's use of contradictory characters (Joe's nympho to Seligman's virgin), as well as the symbolism and philosophical discussions. It's one of those films that forces you to think deeply while watching, and even more so, after it's done. But, then again, many people watch movies to escape reality.
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"Nymphomaniac Volumes 1 and 2"
starring: Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgard, Stacy Martin, Shia LaBeouf, Christian Slater, Uma Thurman, Sophie Kennedy Clark, Connie Nelson, Jamie Bell, Willem Dafoe, Mia Goth, Jean-Marc Barr, Michael Pas
written and directed by: Lars von Trier
I thoroughly enjoyed Lars von Trier's brand new film, and not just because it's filled with lots of nudity and sex, or because its existence bred extreme controversy and critics and naysayers. No, I enjoyed it because, as a film, it is truly a piece of art. Lengthy, yes. But, in order to tell the story completely, there really isn't much wasted, unnecessary time filled in. It's an outrageous and provocative film, you cannot deny it that, even though it is also very self-indulgent, but then again, isn't the act of sex also rather self-indulgent, if not, at least it's self-gratifying. His film attempts to see and examine sex through the eyes of a damaged woman who has openly attempted to making it her mission in life to remove the whole idea of "love" from sex, in our love-fixated society.
"Love is blind. No, it's worse. It distorts something. It's something I never asked for," says Joe, rather plainly at one point during her diatribe to Seligman.
The film is not necessary about sex. It's not even about waxing philosophical (about sex). The two main characters, Joe (played by Charlotte Gainsbourg) and Seligman (played by Stellan Skarsgaard), are supposed to represent those two parts. "Nymphomaniac" is essentially about how silly sex can actually be and how silly it can make us. I know that seems like a bizarre take on such subject matter, because, yes, sex is heavy and deep and carries with it a lifetime of consequences.
Lars von Trier seems to know exactly how to tackle the subject, by making it fascinating, engaging, and quite frankly often didactic or edifying for the viewer. Joe represents the grim tone and bleak outcome of the film, since she is engaging in a long monologue of her life's story as it relates to her sexual journey. The flashbacks often come off as playful, fun, and entertaining.
Charlotte Gainsbourg plays the androgynously named Joe, who, at the opening of Volume I, is discovered lying bruised and battered in a dark alley by Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård). Seligman takes her in, tucks her in bed, and gives her tea. He is a complete stranger and he asks what happened. She warns him up front that it will not be a nice story, that she is a bad person. He assures her that nothing she tells him will shock him. He thinks she may be being too hard on herself. There's something almost unfinished about Joe, a flat affect, as she insists that her behavior has been beyond-the-pale. As the rain pours down, she tells him her story.
The first Volume belongs to the beautiful, young, unknown actress that plays Joe as a young woman, beginning her sexual journey of self discovery. This actress is Stacy Martin. And she is perfection.
In the flashback sections of Volume I, the young Joe is played by Stacy Martin, being raised by a "cold bitch" of a mother, and a kindly doctor father (Christian Slater) who passes on to his daughter a love of flora and fauna. She discovers early on that when she touches herself between her legs, she gets what she calls "the sensation". Joe views her virginity as something that needs to be gotten rid of pronto, so she hits up a local rough-around-the-edges mechanic named Jerome (Shia LaBeouf) to do the deed; he complies with very little ceremony and no preamble. Jerome keeps entering the film, through various hard-to-believe coincidences. The mechanic somehow is transformed into a pencil-pushing office manager. When Jerome re-appears for the third time, Seligman, still listening, calls Joe on embellishing the story. This is sounding fictional now, cries Seligman. She must be making this up!
Young Joe, once she lost her virginity, starts her quest to have as much sex as she possibly can. Her partner-in-crime for this is a young friend who is even more daring, and who comes up with various sexual competitions. They board a train and keep a running tally of how many conquests they can each make over the course of the night. Joe is amazed to discover how easy it is. She tells Seligman of her learning curve, the tactics and strategies she used as she worked that train. Every man is different. She is cold and calculating about it, and the scene really captures the restlessness and kamikaze bravery of young girls first trying out their sexual powers without knowing at all what they are doing. "Nymphomaniac" does not judge Young Joe and her friend. The only person judging Young Joe is the mature Joe, wrapped up in blankets, telling Seligman the story.
What's great about "Nymphomaniac" as a story is that it does not make the mistake of pretending to be a story of redemption or of trauma. That would be too easy. Instead, the message Joe is trying to say is that sex feels good all on its own. Sex is its own reward. Sex isn't something we should be afraid of experiencing and talking about.
Seligman sometimes misses the point of Joe's narrative, musing about how addiction can dull a person's moral apparatus. Joe wants to make sure she is perfectly clear with him: She embraced sex because of the "sensation" it provided her. The power she had over men was secondary. She loves lust, and her lust makes her heartless. Well, it's a heartless world. Joe sees herself as an outlaw, taking charge of her own hunger
The first Volume ends on Joe's tragic note, of having somehow lost her ability to climax or feel an orgasm, which forces her to confront the painful crossroad in her life of her sexual philosophy.
And then Volume Two picks up and I think many film critics have dismissed Volume Two as simply von Trier going all self-indulgent and pretentious, but I think they've sort of missed the point and the connection between both films (which I saw back to back which I think helps). Sure, Volume Two is a lot more focused on the pain and suffering Joe endures, but it's all necessary to her end-journey and self-discovery.
Having discovered the constraint of love (i.e. that real love is about the concern for someone other than herself), Joe proceeds to embark on a series of painful misadventures that pull her deeper into the world of anonymous sex, with an added emphasis on self-objectification and brutal sadomasochism, which are implicatively intended to cast her capacity for love out of her body. And there is a lot of self-loathing embedded in Joe's character. Said loathing is most pronounced in the chain of encounters that serve as Volume II's centerpiece. Joe eventually arranges to meet K (Jamie Bell), a sadist, who, pointedly and tellingly, always has a long line of grateful, bored housewives in his reception room awaiting his demeaning brutalization. After a series of implied negotiations, K ties Joe up to a couch, props her rump up in the air just so, and proceeds to administer beatings that grow so awful as to earn their inevitable comparison to the 40 Roman lashings administered to Jesus.
In Volume Two we also meet Joe's protege in the job she undertakes as a debt collector. This relationship has interesting, albeit, foreseeable outcomes. I won't get into much of it here, because it's the build up to the climax of the film and I don't want to spoil everything, but this story worked on many levels for me. I'll only say that Joe loses a lot by the end of the film, but, she really needs to for the story to work.
I really enjoyed and understood von Trier's use of contradictory characters (Joe's nympho to Seligman's virgin), as well as the symbolism and philosophical discussions. It's one of those films that forces you to think deeply while watching, and even more so, after it's done. But, then again, many people watch movies to escape reality.
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