Audiences who thought they'd seen enough of Lars von Trier's 'Nymphomaniac' don't know what they're missing, as missing abortion scene makes the movie. By Peter Debruge. Chief Film Critic. That will come as sacrilege to some, who consider Cannes the undisputed titan among international film showcases. And it may baffle the Oscar-obsessed, who look to Telluride and Toronto for indications of what will win Academy Awards.
But there remained still an entire hour of footage unseen, including the single most upsetting sequence this critic has ever witnessed, and the victor would be whoever brought this controversial film before the world in its entirety. Popular on Variety. When the press first learned that von Trier had been pressured to trim nearly 90 minutes of footage for release, imaginations raced as to what might have been so scandalous as to be excluded.
At Berlin, we learned that, apart from a few graphic penetration shots, nearly all of the omitted footage came from the surrounding dialogue between self-proclaimed nymphomaniac Joe Charlotte Gainsbourg and her intellectual interrogator, Seligman Stellan Skarsgard , making the talky film, already quite humorous, even denser and more amusing. So what could Part 2 possibly add, we wondered, except perhaps more spanking?
Which, of course, it does. Come to find, rather than simply padding what had previously been there, von Trier restores a high-impact subplot in which Joe performs her own abortion with sterilized needles and no anesthetic β by far its most confrontational sequence and an indispensible if nearly unwatchable key to understanding the film overall.
As we know, she left her family for one last session with the sadist, K Jamie Bell , finally capturing her elusive orgasm. Back on the horse, as it were, Joe has stopped taking her birth control pills out of a crippling fear of getting pregnant. Prior to this, Seligman has been a patient and sympathetic listener, forgiving her worst transgressions with rationalizations based on philosophy and literature. Joe has already erased from her conscience the existence of her family when she learns that she is carrying another child.
