{"id":10744,"date":"2014-03-25T12:38:32","date_gmt":"2014-03-25T19:38:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forallevents.com\/reviews\/?p=10744"},"modified":"2014-03-25T12:38:32","modified_gmt":"2014-03-25T19:38:32","slug":"nymphomania-volume-1-film-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forallevents.com\/reviews\/nymphomania-volume-1-film-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Nymphomania (Volume 1) — Film Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nymphomania (Volume 1)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Directed by Lars von Trier<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This movie goes on my all time Ten Worst List.\u00a0 It is one of the most awful movies I have ever seen.\u00a0 I went with a friend and I tried to get him to leave after half an hour, but he insisted on sitting it out to the bitter end.\u00a0 I think in part he was punishing me because it was my idea to go see this.<\/p>\n

The title is an outright lie.\u00a0 This is not about nymphomania.\u00a0 The girl portrayed in this film is depressed, detached, and probably suicidal.\u00a0 If she can be labeled as anything she is probably what they call a ‘borderline’ personality.\u00a0 But she is definitely not<\/em> a nymphomaniac.\u00a0 Furthermore, the character of the girl is not at all convincing or realistic. She comes across as some man’s fantasy of a woman, rather than a real woman.\u00a0 It is, furthermore, a hostile, derogatory fantasy.\u00a0 It is a negative conceptualization of female sexuality by a man who seems to know very little about women or sex.<\/p>\n

‘Nymphomania’ is not a formal psychiatric category.\u00a0 It is not in the DSM-V<\/em>.\u00a0 It is an informal term that refers to an unusually strong sex drive in a woman.\u00a0 I dislike this term and never use it.\u00a0 It has a clinical ring to it and a derogatory cast.\u00a0 More generally, the practice of categorizing people according to their sexual behavior is completely wrongheaded and leads to all sorts of misunderstanding, distortions, and bigotry.\u00a0 This film is a very good illustration of that.<\/p>\n

The friend that I attended this film with is a joyously married man of many years. \u00a0He was skeptical that such a thing as a ‘nymphomaniac’ even existed.\u00a0 He thought it was something like Bigfoot, where you only see the footprints, but never encounter the beast itself.\u00a0 He asked me if I have ever encountered such a woman.\u00a0 I have encountered at least five women that I can think of, and have heard tell of others, who could qualify for this label.\u00a0 They are a rarity in American society, and our culture does everything possible to discourage this outcome of female sexual development.\u00a0 I think there would be many more such women if the culture fostered them.\u00a0 I don’t call them ‘nymphomaniacs,’ I call them ‘volcanoes,’ or ‘furnaces.’\u00a0 It is less abstract and more evocative of the awe and wonder that such women inspire.<\/p>\n

This filmmaker confuses promiscuity with ‘nymphomania.’\u00a0 Promiscuity can be motivated by many things, and the kind of promiscuity portrayed here is driven by depression, emptiness, low self esteem, anxiety, and loneliness — and possibly, at an unconscious level, rage.\u00a0 ‘Nymphomania,’ as I understand it, is an unusually strong sexual appetite coupled with a ready and strong responsiveness to sexual stimulation.\u00a0 It is anything but disengaged and detached, as represented here.\u00a0 It is not necessarily promiscuous, in fact, such women tend to create stable relationships with one or more partners of both sexes.\u00a0 Having multiple, ongoing sexual relationships is also not the same as promiscuity.\u00a0\u00a0 Promiscuity is shallow and anxious.\u00a0 Nymphomania tends not to be.\u00a0 So the filmmaker has chosen an inappropriate title for his film, because he doesn’t understand the woman he is trying to portray and clearly does not know anything about women with exceptionally strong sexual capabilities.<\/p>\n

You can tell right away that this film was not made in America or by Americans.\u00a0 A man goes out after dark to buy something at a convenience store in his neighborhood and on his way home notices a woman lying on the sidewalk bruised and bleeding.\u00a0 He helps her to her feet, takes her to his apartment and proceeds to nurse her.\u00a0 This is something that would never happen in an American city.\u00a0 An urban American man would never pick up a bruised, bleeding, semiconscious woman off the sidewalk and take her to his apartment.\u00a0 It is unthinkable.\u00a0 So right away the story takes on a fantastic quality to an American audience.<\/p>\n

It is never explained how she came to be battered and bleeding and semiconscious on the sidewalk.\u00a0 She sits there through the entire movie with her face all beaten up relating the story of her life and carrying on a wide ranging philosophical discussion with this stranger she just met, when her entire life, as she retells, it is a series of encounters with an endless parade of men of the utmost superficiality and minimal emotional connection.\u00a0 Why she would suddenly open up and begin to philosophically muse over her life with this stranger under these extraordinary circumstances is hard to fathom.\u00a0 The movie consists of long philosophical discussions punctuated by simulated sex scenes.\u00a0 The sex is not very good and neither is the philosophy.\u00a0 If you want to see pornography, don’t go to this.\u00a0 There is nothing erotic about this film at all.\u00a0 It is actually a downer.<\/p>\n

The film amounts to an attack on this woman’s character and behavior led by the woman herself.\u00a0 I think this is the reason she is allowed to sit there on camera with her face all beaten up through the whole movie.\u00a0 The filmmaker wants to make sure she is made as unattractive and unappealing as possible.\u00a0 He hates this woman.\u00a0 He wants to drive it home that this beaten up, uglified face is the well deserved outcome of her character and behavior.\u00a0 This film is a very conservative affirmation of marriage and monogamy.<\/p>\n

Things get increasingly ridiculous as we go along.\u00a0 There is a long highly improbable scene of a ditched wife coming to Jo’s apartment with her three kids and bitterly berating Jo at length in the presence of her husband, who has just left her, for destroying her life and wrecking her marriage.\u00a0 By the time she went away bawling I couldn’t blame her husband for leaving her.\u00a0 There is a discussion of the differences in polyphony between Palestrina and J.S. Bach.\u00a0 There is a sequence of a chorus doing a Palestrina chorale.\u00a0 There is an explanation of the Fibonacci sequence and its relationship to the Pythagorean theorem.\u00a0 We see a jaguar with a young fawn in its mouth.\u00a0 Sex scenes are accompanied by chorale preludes from Bach’s Little Organ Book<\/em>.\u00a0 All of this is supposed to have something to do with nymphomania.\u00a0 It’s totally crazy.<\/p>\n

If you fail to listen to me and make the mistake of going to see this, keep in mind that what you are seeing is not<\/em> nymphomania.\u00a0 ‘Nymphomania’ is a lurid title to draw you in, but this ambiguous term does not describe the character of the woman portrayed.\u00a0 Jo is, in fact, at the other end of the spectrum.<\/p>\n

I couldn’t see any redeeming qualities in this film. \u00a0There is nothing good I can say about it.\u00a0 Stacy Martin’s nude body is good.\u00a0 You can hardly go wrong with a good looking naked girl, but that is not enough to sustain a full length movie in this day and age.\u00a0 It is not that hard to see a naked girl any more.\u00a0 And the movie is rather long, or at least it seems to be.\u00a0 Sorry, but this one is a total loss.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nymphomania (Volume 1) Directed by Lars von Trier   \u00a0 This movie goes on my all time Ten Worst List.\u00a0 It is one of the most awful movies I have…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":124,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"yasr_overall_rating":0,"yasr_post_is_review":"","yasr_auto_insert_disabled":"","yasr_review_type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[837],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-10744","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-joe-cillo"},"yasr_visitor_votes":{"stars_attributes":{"read_only":true,"span_bottom":"