Nymphomaniac or NYMPH()MANIAC as it reads on the One Sheet, is a very long film of about four hours. It’s been broken into two parts, as has been all the rage since Kill Bill. We open with a very average looking man walking to the store to buy some milk and tea. He walks past an alley where a woman lies bleeding. On the way back, he notices her and offers her his help. He takes her to his apartment where she proceeds to tell him her life story. Cue the endless voice overs and sexually explicit flashbacks
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Nymphomaniac reminded me a bit of The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, a movie that was clearly made by someone who knows how to make movies, but still managed to make a film that failed on every possible level.
Nymphomaniac was also good looking, had good actors, and yet, about two thirds of the way through I saw where it was going and desperately wanted it to surprise me with a hairpin turn at the last moment. Instead the ending was the one telegraphed from practically the opening scene. A rotten ending can ruin even an interesting movie for me, and this ending sucked.
Having said that, the rest of the story was interesting enough. It was the tale of two people’s lives, one obsessed with sex from childhood and one obsessed with reading from childhood. So there was this kind of seesaw between hairy genitals and long winded discussions about Fibonacci sequences and fly fishing and the reason Jesus received 39 Lashes instead of 40. The intention, I believe, was to make the graphic sexuality seem less titillating as you are forced to stop and think every time something sexual happens. There is a lot of nudity here and lots of clear shots of sex organs and sex acts.
Our male hero listens as our female villain rattles off a laundry list of cruel and vile acts, all while he nods and prattles on about how none of this makes her a bad person. He professes a number of times that he doesn’t believe there are any bad people. The woman, meanwhile, is evil incarnate-but not because she can’t keep her knees together, that’s just the symptom not the cause. She would have been evil, no matter her passion.
The story of the sexual insatiable woman has always fascinated men, having sex with ten partners a day is not a skill most men possess, even if they did have that many willing partners lined up in their appointment book. The S&M aspect of the story is also fantasy, a woman who wants to be bound and brutally beaten without a Safe Word. The entire final chapter is filled with things that don’t make sense, even in this world where thousands of sex partners doesn’t lead to death from AIDS or jealous wives or at the very least the occasional case of crabs.
I was reminded of other stories and other tales throughout Nymphomaniac, as other works are constantly referenced and occasionally quoted. This is a movie that wants to pretend that it’s a modern day Madame Bovary or an extended Twilight Zone episode or some simpler morality play from the Middle Ages. I liked a lot of this film and it did make me think once or twice.
But I can’t forgive Nymphomaniac it’s ending.
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