Filmmaker provocateur Lars von Trier's latest movie exceeds even his own perversions. The title, Nymphomaniac, tells you much. A troubled woman named Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is rescued and helped to convalescing by a professorial type (Stellan Skarsgard). She explains her despair, recounting the history of her sexuality. Another man might pounce, but the scene remains cerebral, she in bed, he by her side. The voice of von Trier, he listens to each anecdote, responding with correlatives in science, in nature, in the world of ideas, while the viewer is treated to visual flashbacks starring Stacy Martin; in her first movie, as young Joe, she engages in a game with a classmate whereby she has sex with as many men on a moving train as possible, the prize, a bag of candies. Dressed in demure dresses and knee socks, Joe becomes the traditional object of the male gaze, allowing von Trier to muse about the human organism as an anthropologist might.
And we see quite a bit. Stacy Martin seems too young to be observed naked with a man going down on her. At 23, the actress assured a reporter that her parents approved the scenes. After the MoMA premiere, at the party at Butter Midtown hosted by Interview Magazine and Absolut Elyx, Martin said she would call her mom and say, I'm getting fitted for my vaginal prosthesis today. Okay, have a nice day would be the response.
Co-stars Skarsgard, Christian Slater and Uma Thurman attended the party chatting with John Cameron Mitchell, Gillian Anderson, John Krokidas, James Schamus, Michael Shannon among many guests. Absent at this celebration, Shia Leboeuf who plays Joe's true love Jerome; their scenes together are so hot, it would have been fascinating to talk to him now about his claims to non-fame. Gift bags included sex toys from Jimmy Jane.
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