Nymph()maniac: Volume 2

The second part of Nymphomaniac starts as boring to give you a punch in the gut at the ending. Shia LaBeouf delivers an excellent performance, and Stellan Skarsgård’s acting remains solid. All the actors are without reproach, actually. We even see more of Charlotte Gainsbourg instead of her younger self played by Stacy Martin. Charlotte makes quite an impression with her nipples, which I’ll probably never forget. You don’t get to see nipples as pert as hers in movies much, if you see them at all. What is worse, however, is that Lars von Trier continued his episodic, meaningless narration, which is boring in places, interesting in others and way too philosophical in yet other moments. And this keeps going on until the moment when Stellan convinces you of something you would be better not knowing. After these almost four hours, the ending is a blow to a soul of every feeling viewer. I’m giving this film one star because Lars filmed it quite skillfully. It can’t be denied that he’s a good director, but all the rest in this film is pure suffering. (12/10/2014)

We left the comedy part behind us and now we get the sad part. So the viewer isn’t entertained, but he’s still curious. Of course, there’s a touch of S+M in the movie, but it’s an act of despair, not lust, and so the controversy somehow fades. The story of Fido’s life was certainly worth telling and I really liked that scene with the tree. The worst tasteless slap in the face of the whole story is the ending which more or less ruins the catharsis and doesn’t shock but revolts. It seems very forced. Or the loose ends with Jamie Bell and Willem Dafoe. Is it Lars’s work or the censor’s? Shame, maybe the director’s cut will make more sense. Hey Joe. (01/19/2014)

The second Nymph()maniac romp is such a specific and unique product that I've decided to tolerate even the opinions of the writers of the "boo!" and below average reviews. Before I read the whiny compost of hypocritical declamations, of course. The menacing Director's Cunt is truly essential here, unlike in the first volume, and given its existence the abridged version need not be addressed at all. The uniqueness of the second, three-hour-long Nymph()maniac lies in the unique and almost constant transitions out of the medium, often related to the person of the director, which thus definitively underlines his egomania, but nonetheless opens the gateway to our perception of him through the means he controls (i.e., writing and directing), instead of those means (rhetoric) where he is more at a loss and constantly incurring considerable problems. The film thus comments not only on that famous Cannes Hitlerian empathy, accusations of misogyny, problems with censorship, or the expressive depiction of un-aestheticized nudity and violence. And it does so with a big fuck off in a similarly decently suggestive home-made abortion, subsequently likened to the slaughter of cattle, despite the fact that only a minute ago we could have been showering our love on a breathing aborted fetus. The director's role as a celebrity for senior actors suits Trier, which is why he can afford to deliberately and gleefully rip off scenes from his previous films, almost verbatim, in order to elicit audience reactions that rely on knowledge of the source instead of building the scene on its own merits (a child catching snow). Despite how terribly meta the whole thing is, it's fascinating how the individual sequences work when they're freed from a narrative superstructure for extended periods of time, and for example the whole SM passage with the absolutely bravura Jamie Bell is set in context so seamlessly and yet is so different that it actually underlines the whole idea of Trier's work, where there are no directorial mistakes, only audience ones. (01/02/2015)

After five and a half hours spent with the reruns of both parts, I rank Nymph()maniac: Volume 2 as one of my favorite film experiences. It really is a very entertaining idyll. The alternation of actors in the same roles makes me feel like I’m watching Buñuel, but it's not only in this respect that he is similar to von Trier. Both of them are just making fun of everyone and everything, and I like that. I wasn't pleased at first with the different genre of the second part, compared to the very freewheeling beginning, but the Director's Cut puts this negation entirely behind it. There is up to an hour of new material to see, and this logically provides a new perspective on both the whole and the second half of this black-humored affair. The seemingly strange ideas and messages from the abridged version gain their natural argumentation and their logical place in the plot. I especially appreciate the storyline about abortion, which completes the character of Joe in a brilliant way. On the other hand, I was hoping for more of the new Fido chapter, but apparently, even Lars didn't want to go there anymore. That’s too bad. (07/05/2014)

Simply, the second half of the film, which by the way lasts two hours, is even more tedious and boring than the first part, and it has a strange ending, a strange overall culmination, which will leave you feeling like you missed something. I'm not particularly enthusiastic about this double film. It's not badly directed, but at the same time, it doesn't give the viewer much either. The pseudo controversies are sometimes apparent, but it's part of the film and the subject matter. It's just long and actually quite empty. (05/07/2014)