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Nymphomaniac is rife with references to the cinema of Andrey Tarkovsky, to whom Lars von Trier has often dedicated his work. But one would be at a loss trying to connect this ironically nihilistic film that contains (faux) pornographic content, with the spiritual cinema of the Russian master. Were it not for the occasional reminders and audiovisual cues to the latters films (music by Bach, a religious icon by a skilled ‘imitator’ of Andrey Rublev, a shot of a mirror in which the filmmaker’s body is seen for a moment), Nymphomaniac actually would seem the least Tarkovskyan of all of Von Trier’s films (it draws closer to other of his models, such as Carl Theodor Dreyer or the works of Ingmar Bergman). But it is in reference to Tarkovsky, perhaps, that the film’s ‘a-chronological’ (or, more precisely, with a double temporality—one linear, the other jumbled) nature finds its best clearest justification: it is an act of celebration of Tarkovsky (especially the sublime The Mirror (1975), Von Trier’s favorite film, which boasts a similarly episodic and chronologically jumbled structure wherein a character revisits his life), but, as is so often the case with Von Trier’s darkly humorous and irreverent cinema, it also seems most sacrilegious for doing so.

There is something darkly religious about Lars von Trier’s perverse love of Tarkovsky (and cinema). However immaturely provocative at times, his output retains a degree to which a whole tradition of cinema is being genuinely reprocessed and reinvented, instead of being merely channeled and ‘quoted’ in postmodern fashion. In other words, if the director often indulges in references to pre-existing cinematic traditions (the film noir in his Element of Crime, the Hitchcockian tradition in Europa, the musical melodrama in Dancer in the Dark, etc.), he always reinvents the genre and its potentials in the process, whereas the gesture of pastiche, or blank parodying, of empty citation found in the hands of lesser postmodern filmmakers. In the case of Nymphomaniac, his direct Tarkovskyan citations are not just trite stylish quotes: they are there to emphasize that Nymphomaniac, much as The Mirror was for Tarkovsky, might be his most autobiographic film. Such earnestness combined with irony—creating a tonal ambiguity, which is often considered disingenuous and manipulative—is a stalwart landmark of the production of Lars von Trier, infuriating many of his detractors.

Furthermore, what correlates Tarkovsky and Von Trier is their fascinating yet hugely problematic representation of women (surely, in the case of Von Trier, highly sadistic and often misogynistic). Whereas Von Trier very often depicts powerful (if troubled), central female character (Justine in Melancholia, Grace in Dogville and Manderlay, Selma in Dancer in the Dark, Bess in Breaking the Waves, etc.), Tarkovsky’s protagonists have always been male, in their relationship with beautiful, idealized (but also unreachable and cold) female characters. Both directors’ films have thus repeatedly either lacked a truly satisfying female character, projecting an overload of masculine fantasies and insecurities onto them (to the point of associating them with paganism and witchcraft, as in Andrey Rublev or Antichrist), or destructive, often sadistic cruelty—in Solaris and in the vast majority of Von Trier’s films. It is almost like a covert avowal of impotence, one that Nymphomaniac seems to tacitly acknowledge: seldom has a film centering so pointedly on a subject (female sexuality, desire, pleasure) been more masculine. Unable to unravel what it, at best, regards as a form of ultimate mystery—the film instead performs a weird bracketing gesture, building an intriguing portrait of the male author as a world-weary woman who also happens to be a cipher: an obscene (i.e out of sight, off-stage, sight unseen), void-like mask, a persona, so to speak.