‘Nymphomaniac’ Will Screen Uncut Version at Berlin Film Festival

The Berlin Film Festival will debut the uncut version of the first installment in Lar von Trier’s “Nymphomaniac.”

The grunting and grimacing epic stars Charlotte Gainsbourg, Jamie Bell, Uma Thurman and Shia Labeouf, and is hotly anticipated both because of von Trier’s controversial status and because its scenes of coitus are expected to be envelop-pushing.

The film unfolds with a sex addict (Gainsbourg) recounts her between the sheets past to a charming bachelor who finds her beaten up in an alley. The film will screen out of competition.

“The aesthetic [von Trier] has created in ‘Nymphomaniac’ is impressive and radical,” Berlinale director Dieter Kosslick said in a statement.

The original of “Nymphomaniac” was over five hours long, but has been whittled down in length and will be released in the United States in two parts. A shorter version will open in theaters beginning Dec. 25, 2013, making for a potentially awkward family excursion to the movies.

“Nymphomaniac,” the latest work by Danish director Lars von Trier, is drawing plenty of attention for its provocative trailers and NSFW advance clips. Now the filmmaker has revealed what’s really in the movie.

As you might expect, the film has no shortage of sex scenes. You will see Charlotte Gainsbourg getting spanked in one scene in the movie and in another having sex with Shia LaBeouf, who later will have intercourse with Mia Goth – but only after she has been in bed with Gainsbourg.
Pretty much every major character in the movie has sex at one point or another in the four-hour movie, the latest release from von Trier’s production company Zentropa.

“Provocation has been part of Zentropa’s strategy since its very beginning. Lars von Trier stands for artistic movies which should be anti-bourgeois and if he makes a sex-film, that would be even more titillating. Hence all the media attention,” said Anne Mette Lundtofte, author of a book about Zentropa.

In advance of its release,“Nymphomaniac” has been called “film porn,” a “sex-epic,” and a “porn-drama.”

But after seeing “Nymphomaniac” at one of its very first previews in Copenhagen, it’s clear that although sex is a major part of the movie, it’s not whole story.

In a classical porn movie the sole reason for a plot is to give the viewer a slight pause between sex scenes.

“Nymphomaniac” does have a real plot–it’s about a woman’s sexual journal. In the beginning Joe (in her young years played by Stacy Martin and by Gainsbourg when older)  together with her friend B. (Sophie Kennedy Clark) wanders around in a train and chases the men sitting in the compartments. The two girls have a competition: the one that gets the most men during the trip wins a bag with chocolate sweets.

In general, apart from scenes with oral sex, the onscreen activity is not as graphic as in adult fare (In addition, unlike in real porn, body doubles are used). Also, the film often portrays sex as a mechanical, unemotional act. Von Trier seems to want to show that appetite for sex is human, but that it also sometimes makes humans act inhuman.

Like in other movies by the Danish director, such as “Antichrist” or “Dogville,” things get worse and worse towards the end of the film which closes with the kind of ambiguous note you won’t find in porn movies.

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