Nymphomaniac (18)

Directed by Lars Von Trier

4 Stars

Having antagonised his own and other dogmas with Antichrist, Lars Von Trier is on the attack again.

This time he is mocking misanthropy in this attempt to illustrate the loneliness of the long-distance masochist.

Although designed to play for five-and-a-half hours in two parts, Nymphomaniac has been had to be cut to comply with censorship in different countries.

But, no matter how you slice it, any version will shock those who still cling to notions of spiritual solace and historicist concepts of a humanist future.

Von Trier points the accusing finger at metaphysical and materialist determinism - stressing Marx's notion of humanity changing its conditions of existence.

Opening with a black screen and the sound of dripping rain we hear a scream and slowly focus on the bloodied body of a woman lying in an alley.

She's picked up by a stranger and after taking her home and providing succour, he listens to her sexual saga.

"I discovered my c*nt at the age of two," she explains and continues thus because it seems she detests using euphemisms.

She is Joe (Charlotte Ginsberg) and the Samaritan is Seligman (the superb Stellan Skarsglad) who's an ascetic and asexual atheist who symbolises the "old philosopher."

So, while she "confesses", he comments on fly-fishing, Fibonacci numbers and competing cultural references which are designed to confuse.

Structured in eight chapters, the film relates Joe's determined sexual odyssey, from losing her virginity with the local mechanic Jerome (Shia Labeouf).

Yet despite all her sexual conquests the latter appears throughout, parodying traditional roles from first love to subsequent disasters.

In a hilarious third chapter Uma Thurman appears to play an aggrieved wife arriving to display "the whoring bed" to her kids.

Whereas the first section of the film deals with Joe's rise, the second catalogues her fall as she experiments with sado-masochism under the tutelage of K (Jamie Bell).

There's a farcical threesome with two Africans and a sequence where she uses her charms to extract cash from debtors for L (Willem Defoe).

She teases out a paedophile and then "rewards" him with fellatio for spending a lifetime of incredible self-control.

By the time you reach the last chapter, The Gun, you will no doubt have grown weary of the repetition and miss the shot in the dark that reveals all.

That's the film's triumph over misogyny.

It's designed to engage the intellect, not satisfy those looking for plastic pornography.