Five and a half hours of movies, two up and down.
Images of her masturbating in the bathroom as a child, sex games with friends on the train as a teenager, and later meeting Seligman to interpret everything about her experience with sex addiction from a literary and artistic point of view.
Some cultural and artistic works will make people cry, some will make people melancholy, and some will make people laugh out loud. From a personal point of view, these emotions all exist on the fringes of the mind. The thinking emanating from these emotions makes people understand the world more emotionally.
Putting aside Seligman's lengthy theories and tons of so-called R-rated footage, I see more of a film that empowers women.
The magazine The New Yorker noted in its review that "Women Addict" is an anti-love story because the heroine (basically) disdains love and concentrates on her sexuality. What I see instead is that Nymphomaniac concentrates on the shape of the self in the midst of society's hymns about love, morality, success, consumerism, and more. This characterization is accomplished through the most primitive form of human desire—sex. The director has a heart and spends a lot of space to interpret sexual desire through the crystallization of human beings in the cultural field.
Thanks to Seligman, von Trier's repugnant fantasies are adorned with pseudo-intellectual frippery, a collection of random Wikipedia factoids from Roman history, art history, music history, religious history, political history, and a wink at pop-culture arcana as well.
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