Charlotte Gainsbourg (Christian Geisnaes/Magnolia)

On a snowy night in a dark alley, drain water falls from a gutter atop a trashcan lid, dripping out a metallic music. The window of an upper-floor tenement opens into darkness. Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) lies in the alley beneath the window, beaten, bruised, and left for dead.

Then the soundtrack music kicks in: Rammstein.

It’s a bold and hilarious gesture. This vision of decay and degradation set to the sound of Teutonic head-bangers reads like a chapter out of a brooding teenager’s sketchbook. But that’s Lars von Trier for you. The director’s sexually explicit, controversial new film, Nymphomaniac, announces itself with symbolism that directly refers to his last flirtation with porn, 2009’s Antichrist. That wildly erratic film opened on a likewise snowy night with a lovemaking scene shot in elegant black and white, scored to Handel and cut with hardcore close-ups of body doubles that stood in for the active genitalia of Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg. As the couple approach ecstasy, their young toddler in the next room is intrigued by snowflakes and crawls out of a second story window, falling to his death. His teddy bear following suit.

That scene in Antichrist tells you everything you need to know and didn’t want to know about Von Trier and sex. The death of the couple’s child is punishment for their physical desires. So the titular Nymphomaniac is punished again and again for her transgressions. Nymphomaniac: Volume I is misogynist, misanthropic, ridiculous and sometimes painfully obvious. But it’s also inventive, entertaining, sometimes hilarious, and, at one point, actually moving.

In this instance, Joe is the plaything; Charlotte Gainsbourg fallen out of that window and from grace. Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård) is the Good Samaritan who takes her in to his dingy apartment to nourish her back to physical and emotional health. From her sick bed, Joe tells her rescuer the sordid details of her sexual life, from childhood to young adulthood.

The effect is more uncomfortable than titillating, and strangely cold. Seligman reacts to Joe’s stories by making connections between sexual conquest and his favored pastime, fly-fishing. The catch and release metaphor is an old one, but Von Trier takes it to a fetishistic level—a fetish not for body parts but for fishing lures and casting techniques, illustrated with diagrams and close-ups of the beautiful but dangerous devices that lure sea life into an angler’s orbit. But it soon becomes clear that Joe is not drawn to sex for pleasure, but for power and escape.

Joe’s exploits are divided into chapters, which range from uncomfortable to gross to hilarious; sometimes in the same section. But the thing is, I’m not sure Von Trier meant it to be funny. In the commentary track for Antichrist, critic Murray Smith notes the humor of the film’s iconic woodland scene, to the director’s silence. “There a humorous technique to my writing. That doesn’t mean it’s funny.” But if you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen one of the movies funniest lines: “Would it be alright if I showed the children the whoring bed?” Uma Thurman plays the wife of one of Joe’s lovers in a segment that on paper may have been a harrowing scene of domestic tragedy, but it plays like black comedy on screen.

Stacy Martin (Christian Geisnaes/Magnolia)

Still, the movie’s poster campaign, which features cast members starkly photographed in grotesque o-faces, must indicate a sense of humor, right? Even better, the campaign has inspired various European critics to pose for their own o-face portraits. (So far Matt is the only local critic to respond to my call for a Washington-area critics’ o-face campaign. Editor’s note: I’m still game. — MC)

There are playful elements here, which mark this as a departure from Von Trier’s recent films. The director freely uses superimposed graphics and text and even a triple-split screen in a segment that plays like an erotic version of Peter Greenaway’s The Falls. There are also a good number of face palm moments, from Rammstein to Shia LeBeouf’s British accent, to the apparently unironic use of “Born to be Wild” in an scene of the teenage Joe (played by Stacy Martin) and her girlfriend cruising a passenger train in a contest to see who can seduce the most passengers.

The entire Nymphomaniac epic is a four-hour film (with an uncut five-and-a-half hour version out there somewhere). What premieres in theaters this week is Volume I, with Volume II opening at Landmark’s E Street Theater on April 4. This movie is obviously not for everybody, but based on Volume I, I find it Von Trier’s most consistently engaging and entertaining film in years. I wouldn’t be surprised if you hated it, but I was surprised that I enjoyed it, perhaps despite Von Trier’s intentions.

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Nymphomaniac: Vol. I
Written and directed by Lars von Trier
With Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgård, Stacy Martin, Shia Lebeouf, Christian Slater, Uma Thurman
Not Rated: Contains explicit sexual content, including shots of Shia LaBeouf’s peen. No one under 18 will be admitted
Opens today at E Street Landmark Cinema