Shia LaBeouf famously wore a paper bag on his head at the Berlin International Film Festival premiere of Lars von Trier’s “Nymphomaniac: Volume I’’ — but the director’s joke is on audience members expecting a hot time for their 14 bucks (more on VOD).
It’s hard to imagine a less sexy movie about sex than the first part of this epic pseudo-homage to 1970s porn, even if the Danish provocateur has employed sex-organ doubles and digital wizardry to make it appear as if LaBeouf and some of the other sleepwalking actors are actually doing the nasty.
Mostly, it’s Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) recounting her youthful erotic adventures to Seligman (Stellan Skarsgard), a middle-aged professor who finds her bloodied and battered in an alley and takes her to his spartan apartment to recuperate.
Joe, a self-described sex addict, calls herself a bad person while Seligman compares her exploits to fly-fishing — when he isn’t questioning her veracity while she’s explaining rugelach and dessert forks.
The inexpressive Stacy Martin plays Joe as a teenager in the lengthy flashbacks, including one where she seduces a motorcyclist named Jerome (LaBeouf with a terrible accent that may or may not be British).
Later, Joe and a pal named B (Sophie Kennedy Clark) board a train and compete to see who can have sex with the most men.
Joe (still played by Martin — Gainsbourg stays in bed narrating, at least in “Volume I”) eventually graduates to juggling a dozen lovers, in shifts, in her apartment (the entire film is set in no identifiable location, except maybe von Trier’s hackneyed imagination).
As in genuine porn, most of the acting (except for Skarsgard, who deliberately tries to be funny and sometimes succeeds) is as flat and uninteresting as the script — even when the older Joe narrates a montage of flaccid penises.
The movie briefly springs to life, so to speak, when Uma Thurman shows up for a single scene — which seems like it belongs in another movie — as the spurned wife of one of Joe’s lovers, who has impulsively decided to move in with her.
Thurman’s character — the only one with any personality in the entire film — has two kids in tow, and tries to shame the blank-faced Joe by asking, “Would it be all right if I show the children the whoring bed?’’
But when she’s gone, it’s back to mopey Joe, who has hooked up again with LaBeouf’s Jerome — now her employer — because she can’t resist “his careless elegance.’’
LaBeouf, elegant? At least he’s spared the indignity heaped on Christian Slater, as Joe’s dad, who soils himself (in loving detail) on his deathbed.
Von Trier has made some wonderful movies (“Breaking the Waves,’’ “Melancholia’’) but this pretentious snoozer, like “Antichrist,” isn’t one of them. As a piece of European sexploitation, “Nymphomaniac: Volume I’’ (Volume II is coming in two weeks) makes “Blue is the Warmest Color’’ look like “Gone with the Wind’’ by comparison.