Nymphomaniac: Vol. II (2013)
Joe’s confession gets ugly: Lars von Trier’s second half trades youthful romps for whips, debt collection and a truly nasty last laugh.
Picking up mid-anecdote on Seligman’s spare bed, Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg takes over almost entirely from Stacy Martin here) walks us through the grown-up wreckage: a marriage to Jerôme, a child she can’t feel much for, an orgasm that goes missing, and a decision to outsource her pleasure to a silent sadist called K (Jamie Bell, quietly terrifying) who books appointments and hands out beatings. When the addiction burns her family down, a smooth fixer (Willem Dafoe) points her toward a surprising new career squeezing money out of men by reading their darkest kinks, and a protégée named P (Mia Goth) enters the picture — which leads straight back to that alley where the old bachelor found her.
Von Trier’s director’s cut pushes Joe’s once-playful escapades into very dark territory and drives the fireside-chat framing device to a brutally drastic...
finish. It’s Denmark’s most notorious provocateur doing chapter headings, digressions about religion and guns, and dry jokes in the middle of degradation — shot largely in and around Cologne, Germany, with a chilly, post-millennial European bleakness. Romania’s cinema board briefly declared it unfit for public viewing before backing down. Fair warning: the truly hardcore inserts are body doubles digitally grafted onto the stars.
Here’s the thing about Gainsbourg — she isn’t playing sexy, she’s playing hollowed out, and that’s far more interesting. Gaunt, dark-eyed, flat-voiced, she narrates her own ruin like a woman reading a police report about someone else, and when she finally lets emotion crack through it lands like a slap. Critics agreed the film doesn’t top Volume I, but conceded she delivers a bravura performance. She spends much of it lying passive and expressionless through encounter after encounter, with flickers of ecstasy swallowed by a widening void — Gainsbourg herself admitted she’d assumed nymphomania was about chasing pleasure until von Trier explained the suffering involved. Explicit? Absolutely: full-frontal everything, penetration, whips, a rope-bound flogging sequence, and one bit of business with cutlery in a restaurant that you’ll never unsee. But every sex scene arrives coated in depression, which rather kills the mood — and that’s precisely the point. Watch it for Gainsbourg’s fearlessness, Bell’s icy menace and an ending that’ll have you arguing at the bar for an hour.
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