Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Nymphomaniac Vols. 1 & 2


There was Samuel Fuller's 1964 film, The Naked Kiss. An ex-prostitute becomes a pediatric nurse and gets engaged to the hospital's wealthy benefactor. She finds out he's a pedophile. He tells her that that's why he wants to marry her----she's abnormal, too. A prostitute. She can understand him. (She doesn't. She kills him.)

A scene in Lars Von Trier's Nymphomaniac reminded me of that movie. There's a flashback where Charlotte Gainsbourg tells dirty stories to a partially unclothed man being held down and forced to listen. She's trying to find out what his perversion is. He becomes visibly aroused when she tells a story of pedophilia. But she feels sorry for him and performs an oral act of love on him.

Back in the present, she explains that the guy deserved credit for having never acted on his abnormal impulses, and she felt for him since she was a nympho and wasn't exactly normal herself.

I watched Nymphomaniac Vols. 1 & 2, now available for instant viewing on Netflix.

The movie features Charlotte Gainsbourg as a 40-year-old nymphomaniac. After she gets beaten up and left in an alley, an intellectual takes her up to his room and hears her life story. Her life as a nymphomaniac which we see in flashback.

Most of the scenes have only two people, either talking or having sex.

It bothers me that foreign filmmakers now feel compelled to make their movies in English. Here they speak in English accents. Phony English accents, many of them. Shia LeBeouf appears in it. I think it's the first movie I've seen him in, and he was okay, but I don't know what all the fuss is.

I felt like a bit of a naif watching. It turns out that if a girl asks you where the bathroom is on a train, it means she wants to have sex with you in the bathroom. It's something that would have never occurred to me, but the English seem hip to it.

Nymphomania apparently leaves the poor girl little time for anything else although she manages to parlay her nymphomania into a career or sorts.

The thing that bothered me is that they talk quietly in one scene then have loud sex in the next. If you're watching it in your room in a house with other people, you have to turn the sound up to hear the dialog, then turn it down quick so people don't think you're in there watching porno.

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