Intriguing structure for a rock doc, skipping the band’s rise and opening with their downfall and breakup. When the opening titles hit, the band is over and all its members are living with their parents, then we restart the story from the beginning, leading to the triumphant reunion. Mostly just the band members talking, then when they get dropped from their label we get a nice montage of more popular groups covering their songs. So, no innovative film but it’s a pleasure to spend so much time with Iggy Pop (“In the Ashetons I found primitive man”).


Strummer (1993)

SD handicam mini-doc covering Joe and team mixing the soundtrack for Sara Driver’s When Pigs Fly. “Computers have ruined the kind of music I like. Ultimate control, that’s what people want.” One scene is just Jarmusch recounting his favorite jokes from This is Spinal Tap.


French Water (2021)

Fashion ad starring Julianne Moore and Chloe Sevigny, lost at a party after hours, and a randomly materializing Charlotte Gainsbourg. The music was good, at least.


Jim Jarmusch & Jozef Van Wissem: The Sun of the Natural World is Pure Fire (2012)

People in frilly pajamas float in the river, while one guitarist plucks gentle melodies and the other plays feedback. The music was good, at least.

Looong split screen dialogue, Béatrice Dalle doing most of the talking, with Charlotte Gainsbourg, playing “themselves.” They discuss experiences on movie shoots, death by fire, nudity, and creepy producers.

Next, a producer is telling bald DP Max to take over the movie from director Dalle before the production falls apart, and a cameraman is tasked with spying on her. Meanwhile, Karl from Love is wasting people’s time, trying to get them to sign onto his own film.

The shoot ends with Gainsbourg (and Fury Road’s Abbey Lee) tied to (digitally) burning stakes when the lighting goes haywire. She and Dalle, tormented from all sides, have breakdowns as the picture devolves into flashing blue and red fields.

Divided into two parts with multiple sections each. Rough-looking nymphomaniac Charlotte Gainsbourg is picked up by virgin shut-in Stellan Skarsgard. She tells her story, divided into two long parts with multiple sections, each section metaphorically tied to a different token from Stellan’s bedroom. He is presented as the most patiently nonjudgemental man in the world, then finally tries to rape her in her sleep, because after all, she’s had sex with basically everyone but him. It’s temping to call this a betrayal of his character, but really it seems too tragically real. With all the sexual escapades in the four-hour movie, this final minute is the part I keep thinking about.

Part one is a romp, then part two does away with the fun and games and much of the humor, as “Joe” goes too far and injures herself then can’t have proper sex for a while and has to visit a masochist (haven’t seen Jamie Bell since 2006, forgot what he looked like – he’s got a Ryan Gosling dreamy intensity here) and she becomes obsessed with her first/true love Jerome (Shia LaBeouf, then distractingly a different actor in the last few scenes) and tries to murder him when he takes up with Joe’s girlfriend Mia Goth.

For the most part, except when part two gets too heavy in the middle, the movie mixes things up admirably. It uses cutaway footage with different resolutions and aspect ratios, graphics and captions in part 1, and is overall full of intensely good dialogue. Fun meta-moment when Jerome returns to the story, Stellan tells her the coincidence is too strong and Joe replies you’ll get more out of the story if you just roll with it and believe me.

Christian Slater is Joe’s father, mainly seen during the “Delirium” episode when he’s dying in hospital, and Connie Nielsen (Demonlover) is her severe mother (does she even have lines?). Sophie Clark is Joe’s best friend in part 1, and Uma Thurman gets a huge breakdown scene as the wife of a man who has left her to live with Joe. But, as usual, too small a role for Udo Kier.

M. Sicinski:

… it functions a bit like a notepad, moving through different styles and tones without ever lapsing into stuntsmanship. This is a promiscuous film, one that intends to strip that descriptor of any pejorative scent. Like Joe, Nymphomaniac is exploratory and remains radically open, while retaining a core existential self. It can attach its diegesis to a character who may well weave in and out of objective truth; it may tip its hand into reflexivity, only to pull back and attempt to compel belief, both on the level of story and that of formal organization.

At first it’s a weird mix of the universe-history sections of Tree of Life with the shaky-cam family drama of Rachel Getting Married, but then it starts to come together. Oh actually before that is one of Von Trier’s typically outstanding opening sequences (think the sex/death of Antichrist and the musical watercolors of Dancer in the Dark). Here he uses the extreme slow-motion style of Antichrist, creating motion portraits of what seem like Justine’s depressive dreams, with stylised versions of images we’ll see later: Claire’s yard, the new planet above Earth, pictures from art books.

Part 1: Justine
Kirsten Dunst (last seen in Marie-Antoinette, again playing spoiled and detached) just married Michael (Alexander “son of Stellan” Skarsgard), heads to the lavish reception thrown by her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg of Antichrist; has any other Von Trier lead actress ever returned to work with him again?) and husband Kiefer Sutherland at his Marienbad-like estate. But despite the smiles in public, Justine keeps returning to her ultra-depressive funk, disappearing outside or to other rooms for long periods, leaving the guests waiting, much to the frustration of wedding planner Udo Kier (“she’s ruining my wedding”) who dramatically averts his eyes from the bride whenever he passes.

More drama: the girls’ dad John Hurt is pretty reasonable, but their mom Charlotte Rampling couldn’t be more awful. Justine’s employer Stellan is bugging her – at her own wedding reception – for some tagline for a client, sends round-faced new employee Brady Corbett to follow her. Laboriously, Justine makes it through all the stages and events of her wedding reception, but fucks Brady Corbett instead of her groom. I don’t think he finds out (I ran to the restroom) but nobody is happy with her at the end of the night – father and husband leave without her.

Part 2: Claire
Sometime later (the husband and parents are never mentioned again) Justine is having a crisis, summoned to Claire’s house so her sister can take care of her with homemade meatloaf. The world is all excited that a previously unknown planet has appeared from behind the sun and will pass very close to Earth – various conspiracy theorists say the two planets will collide (one of the images we saw at the start of the film). Kiefer is vocally sure that Earth is safe, and Kirsten is silently sure that it’s doomed – Claire is caught between them.

Of course it is doomed, because what better ending to a Lars Von Trier movie than the destruction of the planet, the fiery obliteration of every character we’ve met? Claire superstitiously stocks up on suicide pills and Kiefer scientifically stocks up on generators and candles and fresh water, but when Kiefer realizes that planet Melancholia has doubled back after its fly-by, he sneaks off to the stables with the pills, leaving the sisters and his son to face the end of the world together.

All set at a single location, a rich family detached from the rest of society. Interestingly IMDB says the advertising image that Stellan has assigned to Kirsten is based on a famous painting, “an unflattering portrayal of excess and spiritual emptiness in a mythical land of plenty.” Kirsten is unusually tuned-in to planet Melancholia, and seems to brighten up as it gets closer. Either she’s perversely pleased by the idea of the planet collision or is spiritually in-tune with the planet, or the cosmic intensity of her depression has summoned the planet in the first place.

C. Wisniewski:

Things go from bad to worse in ways that never seem to reflect real human behavior. … the confusing structure of Melancholia’s first half exposes Trier’s inability at approximating emotional realism. Justine is believably depressive and damaged, but nothing that happens around her has even a whiff of authenticity, first frame to last. I struggled through the wedding sequence to make sense of it all: how she knew her husband or how well or long they’d known one another; why she had agreed to marry and then why she’d decided to sabotage her wedding; and how all of this could possibly happen in one night. Episodic in the worst way, part one plays like a shrill and repetitive run-on sentence authored by someone who has a clear idea of what he wants to say but hasn’t adequately structured and packaged those ideas.

Trier’s world … seems like a lousy, sad, miserable place. I’m glad he got a chance to blow it up.