Eat your heart out, Fifty Shades Of Grey. You don’t know what depravity really looks like. But Lars Von Trier does. We’ve already had several weird images from Von Trier’s upcoming two-part film Nymphomaniac, about the sexual adventures of one woman, played in her slightly later years by Charlotte Gainsbourg. Now the first clip from Chapter 1 of the film has been released and it involves chocolate and trains.
There’s nothing particularly risque going on in this scene. The younger version of Joe, Charlotte Gainsbourg’s character, is here played by Stacy Martin. Her and her friend B (Sophie Kennedy Clark) dicuss how to seduce two young men on a train. That’s the sum total of the scene – no sex, no CGI penises, no (sad face) Shia LaBeouf.
Nymphomaniac promises to be a feast of Von Trier weirdness, and as such will likely make most of the world incredibly uncomfortable. I’m already a little freaked at the decisions to CGI the sex – still not clear on how that’s going to work. Von Trier has always been a polarizing filmmaker, somewhere between an art house genius and a shlock-master, depending on where you stand. I just wish there wasn’t such an undercurrent of violence and unhappiness surrounding sex in his films. I mean, perversion should be fun, shouldn’t it? Why does it always have to be dark and unfriendly?
Nymphomaniac as yet has no American release date, but it premieres in Denmark on Christmas Day. Certainly art house cinemas in America are bound to get it shortly thereafter. If we were subjected to Antichrist, why shouldn’t we be subjected to this?
Check out the clip from Nymphomaniac below, and the brief excerpt from Chapter 1 (via The Guardian) after that. Is it too much to hope that the next clip we get will feature Shia LaBeouf?