A Teddy Bear

Peter Bradshaw. Lars von Trier. Two strangers on a train. Lars speaks Danish. The Englishman can only listen to his own language.

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I put weedkiller into Mr Bradshaw’s fountain pen. Why do this? Envy at his critical talents? Jealous of the free tickets and the jiffy bag of new DVDs? Or is it the Guardian pension plan that calls my wrath down? Nah. Not interested. It’s to kill off those ideas that pop up between the paving slabs of his prose. 

At least he likes Nymphomaniac; although there are no great insights or fine writing, this a rather pedestrian trip around the cinemas of Leicester Square. Yet, looking at him amble down Charing Cross Road, I ponder: have we just watched the same movie?

It is about the most tender, platonic relationship imaginable: a depressed and exhausted woman and an elderly, vulnerable man, played superbly by Charlotte Gainsbourg and Stellan Skarsgård.…

Slowly but surely, Seligman and Joe become friends, of a sort, and all the sex, all the degradation has to be read against the strange comedy of this odd-couple friendship. He is the anti-Mephistopheles to her non-Faust. Yet there is also something magnificently crass in the way Von Trier finally refuses the lenient, sentimental ending he had been heading towards, and restates the final, destructive power of sex.

Charlotte and Stellan? No, Mr Bradshaw, this is Seligman and Joe. So common in film criticism that we hardly notice the error. But how understand a film if we think of the characters as actors not people? Isn’t the danger that rather than looking at the movie we will read it into a cinematographic history that is superfluous and hopelessly misleading? Indeed, Mr Bradshaw wastes so much time in the box-office - all that chat about Lars and his extramural performances - there isn’t much left for the auditorium.

Of course he likes to visit the cinema. Mr Bradshaw has spent too long in multiplexes and not enough in libraries. Thus the misplaced literary reference. No need for the ungainly ‘anti-this’ and ‘anti-that’ when he could have written - directly and simply - Scheherazade and her king. He should visit the arthouses occasionally. Who knows, he might chance upon Pasolini’s masterpiece…. 

The film is very long. We suspect our friendly critic fell asleep towards its end; when,  somebody thinking the movie had ended, so standing up to rush to the tube, disturbed him. Oh, oh, sorry sir. Oh, look, there’s more…. How else explain how Mr Bradshaw misses the development of the relationship; that shift from day to night, as the influence of Seligman wanes and Joe waxes? This supposedly and “magnificently crass” ending grows out of the structure of the film; the slow thawing of Seligman’s desire part of its plot. If only this critic was better read, he would realise that our heroine has run out of stories.

The “most tender, platonic relationship imaginable”. So soft, so cuddly. None of the toughness of a Mann or Jimmy Joyce in this film. This critic sounds like a sales exec from Mills & Boon. But let’s switch to another genre. Mr Bradshaw, with his arm-bands and cap, floats on the loch, as Nessie gazes up from below. The “most tender, platonic relationship imaginable”? Alas, no. This is a movie that shows how friendship isn’t possible between two radically different worlds. All that sentimental stuff is an illusion. Seligman reads his ideas into a life he cannot understand; Joe misreads Seligman. This is a tragedy of misinterpretation. Come to think of it, Nymphomaniac is a commentary on Lar’s troubled relationship with Peter Bradshaw.

I make allowances. The journalist has to churn his pieces out. He reviews a lot of pap, which inevitably affects the critical judgement. He lacks the privileges of the professional amateur; who watches only what interests, writing it up at my leisure. The article is a workmanlike job.

And all the time Joe insists that she is nothing so banal as a sex addict, preferring the quaint term "nymphomaniac", that time-honoured staple of porn, erotic literature and quaint male fantasy. Despite Joe's dull sense that she must be a bad person – a qualm effectively cancelled by her refusal to concede that she is doing anything really wrong – she loves her obsession, she exults in her degradation. She has no wish to be relieved of it and prefers it to the dullness and hypocrisy of everything and everyone that surrounds her. There is heroism in her descent and, with its shaggy-dog stretches of deadpan tedium and detonations of porn-outrage, there is a pulpy brilliance in Lars von Trier's film.

He describes what he sees. Understanding, however, requires us to think as well as look. We listen to Joe, and make our own minds up: she is an addict, who will justify and celebrate the addiction for as long as it lives inside her. At the same time she recognises the bad she has done. She lives with this tension, which Mr Bradshaw trivialises. Is it a “dull qualm” to know that you’ve risked your baby for an orgasm? An act of “heroism”, sir? Have you forgotten how she ‘rapes’ that train passenger, humiliates the pervert…. Do words still have meaning in this age of the computer?

Mr Bradshaw wants sentimentality. It is the Hollywood influence. Joe is an honest person - something of an artist - who knows that monomania has both its own rewards and its evil side-effects. Our friendly film critic wants this to be a nice movie. A good night’s entertainment, to be forgotten as soon as he files his copy. To have spent an evening with a cruel woman? To have fallen in love with a sex pest…. Oh dear, this needs thinking about. Better not!  Give me the next blockbuster.

In my last piece I wrote about the fundamental difference between an architect and an engineer. Here Christopher Wren has become the maintenance man for St Paul’s Cathedral. At least Jack - in The House that Jack Built - recognised genius, even if he himself was its sad parody. He knew a Blake or a Gauguin when he saw one. Mr Bradshaw, we feel, would walk right past their paintings - a salad of colour of the edge of his taste - as he makes for the gift shop.