Opiniões dos críticos

Extreme female masochism has long been a key ingredient in von Trier's cinema. But while Nymph()maniac goes much further down this route even than 2009's Antichrist (whose opening it directly quotes and whose self-mutilation it alludes to), it also shows far more genuine interest in getting inside its protagonist's head.

Nymphomaniac isn't much of a film, in terms of filmmaking. The disjointed editing seems lazy at worst, arbitrary at best, the plotting is often facile, the dialogue could've used a few more drafts; compared to, say, Antichrist – the opening sequence of which gets reprised here – it's a much less beautiful movie. But this ragged, silly, very personal drama isn't trying for beauty. What can you say about a film that leads with the line "I discovered my c*** as a two-year-old"? It's a provocation.

As damaging and near-traumatic repercussions pile up in response to Joe's behavior, von Trier manages the dual achievement of simultaneously refusing to reprimand her for her perceived indiscretions and pledging to remain a watchful witness to their troubling side effects. The result is a film that looks not to individual forces as agents of social problems but rather to systemic injustices.

It's against the overwhelming permanence of this system that Nymphomaniac's sex-negativity takes root. I'm not sure that Von Trier has an answer for how women can escape patriarchy's ever-grinding machinations... What remains clear is that he holds up about as little hope for an innate goodness to sexuality as he has previously exhibited for the innate goodness of the human spirit.

_That's_ daring – making a four-hour epic not just talking about but manifesting one's own agonized gender ignorance. Unfortunately, von Trier never takes on this touchy idea. He instead seems to find profundity in both Seligman's meaningless detours and his heroine's guilelessly compulsive copulating and masochism.

[Joe and Jerôme] meet and remeets with all the subtlety of opera. It's this self-mockery that stops Nymphomaniac from being overly grim and reminds you of the puppet master behind it all. We're never far from Von Trier, and both Skarsgård and Gainsbourg appear to offer different versions of the author himself.

[Joe] isn't a character (admittedly, neither is anyone else in either film), but a device that allows the filmmaker to haphazardly stitch together a variety of sexual fantasies, most of which pivot on the pain and degradation of the female at the hands of an embittered male.

In the end, she is the artist. Von Trier is proud of his provocations yet concerned that the audience may too easily indulge him or, pace David Denby, actually become aroused. Indeed, that, in a sense, is the movie's punchline. Anxious that he will no longer be able to top himself, von Trier is willing to end Nymphomaniac—if not his career—with a cheap stunt meant to rebuke his admirers, as if to prove that he still can.

It makes one think, as my colleague suggested, that if von Trier felt less obligated or imposed upon to explain himself, he might one day resume making visionary work.Nymphomaniac may well be von Trier's most overtly anxious film, constantly stopping both to question itself and inform its audience of its intentions.

Von Trier is the best advertising person in the movie business, and he has come up with a movie that is an ingenious commercial for itself... There's a lot of sex shown in "Nymphomaniac," but von Trier's depiction of sex acts is blandly pneumatic, mechanical, virtually effortless, and filmed as casually and as indifferently as is the rest of the action.

Nymphomaniac not only represents a new direction for Lars, but a new level of directness. It's not just those music cues, or the fact that his beloved male/female dichotomies are so blatantly problematized here... It's that despite the sexual explicitness... or the blend of light comedy with violence and abuse, von Trier has taken a break from his puckish provocateur persona to make a film that wants very much to let you know where its maker stands on things.

What's arguably most compelling about Nymphomaniac is its relentlessly Cartesian organization, a mind/body split that creates all kinds of tension and resonance while steadfastly refusing to integrate its components at a granular level. The impression is of a film as divided against itself as its protagonist—which is of course to say that von Trier knows exactly what he's doing even as he seems to be throwing up his hands in surrender to the irreconcilable agony of it all.