Sara Stewart

Sara Stewart

Movies

‘Nymphomaniac Vol. II’ is a joyless experience for audiences

Sex addiction recovery groups may have just found their new recruitment video. “Nymphomaniac: Volume II” makes the act look about as enjoyable as getting your taxes done (and you should really get on that, btw). Given the scarcity of movies about lust from the female point of view, this is kind of a bummer.

But then, I’ve “probably misunderstood the whole thing,” as Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) tells her host and listener, Seligman (Stellan Skarsgard) toward the end of her interminable tale. Making sex look fun would be so . . . pedestrian. Besides, where would Danish director Lars von Trier be if we clearly and easily comprehended the meaning of his patience-testing films? Misinterpretation is his stock in trade.

On with my own, then: In this volume, darker and less comedic than the first, we see Joe move further into compulsiveness. In flashback, she leaves her partner (Shia LaBeouf) and their infant son, who’s repeatedly imperiled as Joe leaves him alone to visit a — what’s the male version of a dominatrix? A dominator?

In any case, he’s played by a gaunt Jamie Bell as a sort of violent therapist, sought after by nameless women who spend hours in his waiting room until it’s their turn to be flogged. In one of several graphic closeups, we see Joe’s vagina — or rather, a porn-star surrogate crotch — being whipped with a riding crop. It’s the literal depiction of “p–sy-whipped.” It ain’t pretty.

Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg in “Nymphomaniac: Volume II.”Christian Geisnaes/Magnolia Pictures

Seligman, meanwhile, continues jumping in to draw various parallels to Joe’s story: “It seems,” she tells him, “like you’re not taking this very seriously.”

Nor, it seems, is von Trier, who never met a button he didn’t long to push. When Joe invites two black men from a nearby park to meet her in a hotel room, they disrobe and immediately get into a heated argument, turgid genitalia bobbing in the foreground while Joe looks on from the bed. “In my circles, it’s always been OK to call a spade a spade,” she tells Seligman about the incident. Insta-controversy!

Joe dabbles in a 12-step program but finds it’s not for her, gravitating instead toward working for an extortionist (Willem Dafoe), and toward bisexuality. Finally, we arrive at the reason why, at the start of Volume I, Seligman found her bloodied and unconscious in an alley.

But what does it all mean? Is Joe’s nymphomania a metaphor for our collective cultural obsessiveness? Is it a rallying cry for female independence from the shackles of romantic love? The latter theory is espoused by Seligman, but like so many other tossed-off ideologies here, it feels disingenuous.

I’d like to think Joe is von Trier’s avatar, just letting us know he knows we’re all a little restless sitting through his own interminable tales — and that he gets annoyed when we try to graft meaning onto them. Maybe, sometimes, a joyless orgasm is just a joyless orgasm.