Within the first hour of her film debut, year-old Stacy Martin endures more brutality than most actors will face in an entire career.
Because he respects women. No working director focuses so intently on women, or writes roles for women as consistently complex and tough as von Trier has in the last two decades. Nicole Kidman in Dogville. The uneasy atmospheres von Trier cultivates onscreen begin to blur with stories of his real-life behavior.
Nymphomaniac β a two-volume epic that chronicles the life of a proud female sex addict Joe from childhood through age 50 β was a recipe for disaster of classic von Trier proportions.
Only von Trier would have the gall to make a film like this, and only von Trier would submit himself to the challenges of creating it: casting women of all walks of life in a movie with a ludicrous title, filming them in violent sex scenes, and then presenting the finished product to a world that still associates him with the Cannes press conference where he made an off-color joke about sympathizing with Hitler.
When the Nymphomaniac trailers surfaced, you could almost envision the gaffes and bizarre, misogyny-tinged stories that would emerge. And it would not be surprising to learn that Charlotte Gainsbourg β who has starred in his last three films, including playing Joe as an adult in Nymphomaniac β had a von Trier shrine in her home.
