Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Nymphomaniac Vol 1

When you start a relationship based just on sex, there is no room for love or any other feeling than just lust. Is aggressive, immediate, carnal, insensitive and end abruptly.

To me thats the way to explain the first film Nymphomania Vol 1. The film start with Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård) a middle aged loner walking on a dark alley after buying groceries, he finds Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) laying on the floor totally beat up. After take care of her, Joe start telling him the story of her life, how she end up there and the origin of her sexual obsession.

During the course of this first volume Seligman hearing all the sexual chapters of Joe's life, that goes from her sexual discovery to her eminent relationship with Jerôme (Shia LeBeouf) the person who treasure the end of her virginity and also the end of her vaginal sensibility. While Seligman is listening Joe's stories, he provoke her by adding bizarre elements to they stories, thanks to his studies as a scholar, most of the references are related to fly fishing, which later becomes in metaphors of how Joe catching sexual partners from the early age.

Joe's relationship with her father was special, but at the end is represented with a twisted sexual reference by showing a corpse at the same angle of her open legs while Joe is lubricating.

Joe is a sinner Seligman is a sinner, everyone in this film are sinners in a way. Joe express her obsession with sex and lack of pleasure by switching patterns, lying to them in a articulated montage of images back to back.

This not Lars Von Trier finest work, but represents a very risky exploration of a hungry woman who is not socially accepted for her desires, more than her mistakes.

No comments: