Prophylactics for the Hoi Polloi

My old mates Milo and Andrew, what a strange pair. Collaborated, you know, in a film called Sleuth. The games people play. And are still playing, Lars von Trier visits Mark Kermode’s comely home and acts the prankster; although, as yet, he refuses to reveal that last devastating joke, albeit the clues are many and pikestaff plain. 

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They won’t take you seriously, Lars. Do you scare them that much? This is not it. They are not earnest enough to think you anything more than an entertainer. The schedule is busy; the copy editor calls; the next film is to be taken out of its plastic wrap…they don’t have the time to be bothered with the passions you so carefully document. Your thoughts, being complex and paradoxical, get in the way of the simple abstracts they are supposed to write; skinny blocks of prose separating out those fat adverts, so inviting us to consume. There is a deeper reason too. Many film critics lack a literary sensibility, a prerequisite for understanding the art film, which shares the same high estate as literature, its images in celluloid and sound rather than poetry and prose. Instead, we get the low comedy of the peasant, who flashes his arse at his landlord’s noble acres, and farts at the chain-link fence.

Mark Kermode likes to perform on the page. In codpiece and tights he cavorts under the Guardian’s footlights.

With his ear-scraping mockerney shtick, LaBeouf sounds like he's auditioning for a twisted biopic of Dick Van Dyke. Those seeking something genuinely shocking need look no further; if movies were rated for scenes of gratuitous violence against vowels, Nymphomaniac would never have made it past the censors.

It raises a smile. His readers want fun, and he provides the broad comedy once a staple of the BBC. Strange, though, that he should start his piece with on such a tone. Then I realise: this is a warning, I am being told not take this film seriously. Disinfecting the threshold before I walk into the room. A distance has been created, making an important and disturbing movie safe. Donning a prophylactic he protects himself as he wiggles about in the profound. To be pregnant with new thought? MK is too old for that. There’ll be no young ideas running around inside his head; that quiet room, its tasteful style, the glass vases, and those coffee-table books in their squat pyramids, must not be disturbed. This man prefers to entertain himself.

Throughout, the consummate agent provoc-auteur remains torn between an angsty interest in self-obliteration and an adolescent obsession…

I hand him a tissue, and tell him to go the bathroom; and make sure to wash those hands properly before you return. He won’t listen. 

With its wildly absurdist obscenities, fearlessly bold performances and wilfully indulgent lack of structure, Nymphomaniac provokes the now familiar symphony of sighs, gasps and laughs. Amid the chaos, only LaBeouf really comes unstuck, fatally miscast as the object of Joe's true affections. In a film not short on alarming protuberances, it's Shia who sticks out like a sore thumb, a bum note in the cacophony of discordant excess.

You took your time MK. Too much time thinking up new jokes, I shouldn’t wonder, and not enough - I can see - cleaning those filthy fingers. And now you’re going to use my keyboard? Here, take these rubber gloves; and put them on!  

The plot of Nymphomaniac passes MK by: a train trundles though the station as he plays with himself in the public toilet. This is fatal for a review of a film where theme and storyline are intimate as two lovers. He has missed the connecting links of this movie; that supposed lack of structure his broken attention span, as he strokes his epithets, and shakes his sentences up and down. 

This critic has no idea what Lars is about.1 Here he resembles Seligman, whose very intelligence blinds him to what is before those oh so clever eyes. Spending too much time yanking on his wit MK overlooks the obvious.

…a dopey shaggy-dog punchline almost proves its undoing.

We imagine Lars laughing when he read these words. Extraordinary! Did he write Nymphomaniac with MK in mind? How little this man has understood this movie; which, I suspect, is in part a practical joke on the professional film critics who rarely get beyond the surface - ‘absurdist’ - features of his movies. MK spends too much time looking at himself in the mirror, as his hands, deep in the pockets of his prose, juggle with his sweaty neologisms, to understand what’s going on. Poor MK. He hasn’t noticed that Lars has opened the curtains, and we are all peering in.

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 1. I exaggerate:

Joe recounts her self-proclaimed wickedness as a series of Scheherazade-like tales of misadventure, leading us through the long, dark night of her soul and on into morning.

Unlike Peter Bradshaw MK does get the literary reference right. Unfortunately, he doesn't follow this through.