on Trier links his hungry woman to philosophical ideas, mathematics, digressions of all sorts. Sex, it turns out, is meaningless without interpretation. The character has only one way of experiencing her life; the director has many ways of telling it. He gives us a catalogue of male members belonging to Joe’s lovers, and, in medical-textbook mode, drawings and photographs of female genitalia. However profane, “Nymphomaniac” is a modern variant of illustrated seventeenth-century books of miscellaneous erudition, like “Angler” or Robert Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy,” and of such eighteenth-century libertine texts as the Marquis d’Argens’s “Thérèse Philosophe”—a volume in which the sexual “education” of the heroine gets interrupted by discourses on the truth of philosophical materialism and the falsity of religion. But, though the movie is marvellously intriguing when it’s bookish and artificial, it becomes weak when it attempts sincerity. The repeated scene of Joe walking in the woods with her adored father (Christian Slater) is poetic in a flossy, boring way. Uma Thurman, playing the wife of a man sleeping with Joe, shows up with her three young sons at Joe’s apartment and rages magnificently, but she seems to be in a different movie—one in which real people have real feelings. This is a work of pornography, in which fantasy, and the contemplation of it, is the only thing that’s real. Like most porn, even art porn, “Nymphomaniac” falls apart at the end. Von Trier even seems to be pranking the audience. But the director has at last created a genuine scandal—a provocation worth talking about. ♦