Film Carew: Nymphomaniac, Aim High In Creation!, The Missing Picture

Nymphomaniac

Moral-handwringing over Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac - billed as one of the most sexually-explicit movies ever made - is almost incomprehensible; beamed in from some alien alternate-reality in which vast reserves of pornography aren't easily accessible to a global population. Von Trier clearly knows this: the great provocateur utilising a vast array of other images (shit, piss, blood, bondage) and ideas (a defense of paedophiles who repress their desires, the mystical otherness of Africans in European society, the erect cock as barometer of truth, religious eroticism) with which to poke an uptight audience. Which is to say nothing of the endless sex metaphors that litter his audacious, four-hour, two-part tale of the complete sexual misadventures of Charlotte Gainsbourg's titular nymph. Her cunt is a pair of supermarket doors; her sexuality a fly-fishing lure; and, well, then there's The Silent Duck...

Gainsbourg recounts her life as a “long and moral” bedside anecdote for Stellan Skarsgård, an asexual academic who's non-judgmental about the morals of the fable, but aroused by its abundant symbolism; all this fucking making him think of Poe, Faust, Wagner, Beethoven, Zeno's Paradoxes, Messalina, Fibonacci, numerology, Catholicism, mysticism. As Skarsgård interjects and Gainsbourg replies, it becomes a meta-conversation on storytelling; von Trier using gimmicks - chapters, abundant cutesy stock-footage, a scene that rewinds the film, arguments over the symbolic implications of storytelling - to paint both the narrator and the listener as unreliable.

“You've misunderstood the whole thing!” Gainsbourg hollers, at one point, and it's one of many moments where von Trier is speaking through his characters. Cannes' great persona non grata tellingly throws in instances where characters clarify that “anti-Zionist is not anti-Semitic” and lament the hypocrisy of a society that champions those who say right but mean wrong, and mocks those who say wrong but mean right. “Each time a word becomes prohibited, you remove a stone from the democratic temple,” Skarsgård says; Nymphomaniac duly, defiantly using the word 'cunt'. And so goes the spirit of Gainsbourg's character, who defends her right to not be called a sex-addict, to be proud of the “dirty, filthy lust” that morality police are out to expunge from the Earth, as if a stain on society.

If images of endless cocks and people fucking has lost its outlawed thrill, the sight of famous humans engaged in 'out there' art is, in contrast, undeniable audience-bait. There are times when Nymphomaniac actually feels like slash-fic brought to life; someone out there, surely, having longed to see Billy Elliot whip Serge Gainsbourg's daughter with a riding crop. Gainsbourg is both game and graceful in her role, a good sport unruffled by the directorial manipulations that reduced Björk to a wreck; the film often relishing the contrast between her toffee accent and its blue dialogue. Performance Artist Shia LaBeouf is clearly keen on the 'unsimulated' vibes, but his own quasi-English/Swiss/South African/Transatlantic accent wavers from take-to-take, and changes completely from scene-to-scene; the thrill of the Transformers kid goin' blue wearing off long before LaBeouf exits the film. In contrast, Uma Thurman's ten minutes on screen are one of the great joys of moviegoing in 2014; she at once hilarious and riddled with pathos, the actress relishing von Trier's oddball humour like few others ever have. And, in the end, that's the final effect of Nymphomaniac's four hours: not of controversy, abundant hype, or celebrities with digitally-grafted porn genitals, but of good-natured humour; its mischievous comedy washing away all the turgid clichés of 'erotic cinema'.

Aim High In Creation!

The last time a troublemakin' documentarian snuck behind North Korean lines, it resulted in the performance-art monkeyshines of Mads Brügger's The Red Curtain. Yet, Anna Broinowski's Aim High In Creation! is - for someone who so thoroughly skewered cinematic notions of truth with Forbidden Lie$, her embedded exposé on memoir-fictionalising conwoman Norma Khouri - a surprisingly sentimental satire. There's plenty of instances herein highlighting the hypocrisy of life in the DPRK, but, let into the country as the first Western filmmaker granted full access to the Pyonyang Film Studios, Broinowski takes part in a genuine cultural exchange, in which shared humanity rises above mischief-making. She's come to learn the ways of cinematic propaganda so as to make an anti-Coal-Seam-Gas film in defiance of plans to drill in Sydney Park. The film-within-a-film gambit feels almost like a ruse; or at least an excuse for a filmmaker fascinated by Kim Jon-il's manifesto The Cinema And Directing to peek inside the sausage factory. The results may be uneven, but there's a host of fascinating ideas at play, and Aim High In Creation! eventually finds its heart when it starts taking its own ideologies seriously, and heads to rural Queensland to see the horrors of life on the increasingly-toxic ground in Australia's Coal Seam heartland.

The Missing Picture

The Missing Picture also explores the cinema of totalitarianism; Pol Pot's Cambodian genocide only achieving its revolutionary fantasies on screen. Kumpuchean propaganda pictures shot rice paddies tended by hearty workers, but in reality the once-bourgeoisie were being starved to death whilst toiling in indentured servitude. “Who filmed the worm-eaten knee of my neighbour?” Rithy Panh wonders, in a poetic voice-over that accompanies a survivor's memoir of life amidst a holocaust. There's no footage of these horrors - and none of life before the Revolution; all old films burnt, the whole film industry executed - so Panh recreates his memories via clay figures. The Missing Picture begins with the carving of a single figure, his father, but things get elaborate; Panh's Marwencol a host of elaborate dioramas, of jungles and rice fields, buffalo and dogs, floods and rainstorms. He plays with the form: inserting clay figures into old news-reels, or projecting films into the miniature sets; even staging dream sequences in which he, as figure, 'flies' through time and space. There's hints of French existentialist about Panh: “there is no truth, only cinema,” he intones, at one point; speaking not just of life under a regime, but of a philosophical perspective on the media age. But as much as it's a work alive to meta-commentary (there's a scene which imagines Panh's parents watching, and critiquing, the film as it plays), it achieves profundity due to its tiny, unforgettable details: the “capitalist” cars “re-educated” as irrigation machinery; the cameraman disappeared for 'badly' filming a Pot speech; a nine-year-old boy renouncing his mother for picking mangoes, thereby condemning her to execution; a father's hunger strike a defiant death on behalf of free-will; of eating rats and drinking mud to survive, then being burdened with the inexorable guilt of having actually survived.