He’s either the bad boy of Danish cinema or a pretentious, misogynist hack. Either way, director Lars von Trier is aces at getting a rise out of audiences (sometimes literally).
But after seeing a screening of “Nymphomaniac: Volume I,” which opens Friday, we think von Trier might be getting more in touch with his lighter side. Does the edgy auteur have a sense of humor? Or is his movie about a sexually compulsive woman narrating her life in flashback unintentionally hilarious?
Either way, here are the funniest scenes:
PENIS MONTAGE
Midway through the film, Charlotte Gainsbourg’s character, Joe (Stacy Martin in flashbacks) reflects on her sexual past with a nearly two-minute-long slideshow of male genitalia, depicted so closely that each (to varying degrees) fills up the entire screen. It feels like one of those “Family Guy” jokes that go on for so long they stop being funny and then start again.
FISHING METAPHORS
Stellan Skarsgard’s character, who’s found Joe unconscious in an alley and brought her to his house to recover, listens to her early tales of depravity through a very specific filter: his love of fly-fishing. He connects her carnal tales to the sport. As she describes trying to find a stranger to seduce on a train, his reaction is, “You were reading the river!”
UMA THURMAN’S SCENE
As the wife of a man who is cheating on her with Joe, Thurman talks her way into Joe’s apartment with her three small boys in tow. There, she confronts Joe, inquiring: “Would it be all right if I showed the children the whoring bed?”
‘RIGHT TO BE HORNY’ CLUB
A teenage Joe forms a club with her girlfriends to celebrate the pursuit of sex, without love. To cement their resolve, they develop a vagina-celebratory mantra that they scrawl on the wall and chant with the seriousness of Gregorian monks: “MEA VULVA, MEA MAXIMA VULVA.”
SHIA LaBEOUF’S ACCENT
Is his accent English? German? American? Mostly, what he is is unintelligible — but then, perhaps this is von Trier’s comment on the inherently generic nature of the male partner in Joe’s eyes. Or maybe LaBeouf is just bad at accents.