Film Review: Darkness at swoon

As long as Lars von Trier is around there will be hope for cinema.

The enfant terrible of European cinema may not always succeed in his ambitions but his ambitions are so singular and executed with such healthy disregard for anyone and anything that gets in the way of his megalomaniacal vision that the results, while not always comfortable, are always provocative. His much anticipated, controversial two-part, four-hour epic Nymphomaniac is no exception.

The first volume displayed a surprisingly light and often humorous touch in its introduction of Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) whose erotic confessions to Seligman (Stellan Skarsgard) form the narrative spine of both films.

In the second volume we move into Joe's adult obsessions and the circumstances that land her beaten in an alley in the beginning of the first film. Things get darker, more violent and sinister.

Von Trier's focus is not on pornography (although there's no doubt that the film is graphic in its depictions) but on philosophical questions about addiction, female sexual power and masculinity's response to it. It is the ideas that count and, as a filmmaker motivated by ideas and armed with an ability to use the medium to express them, Von Trier is second only to Jean Luc Godard, the smartest of the French New Wave directors whose influence is seen all over Nymphomaniac Volume I.

Volume II displays a more Scandinavian heritage; godfathers are Ingmar Bergman and Von Trier's acknowledged hero, Danish film legend Carl Dreyer.

In spite of the very NSFW titillation of the publicity campaigns for the films, sex here is not fun. For Joe it is a drug, the pursuit of which leads her down ever darker avenues. While Volume II does not quite tie up the holes in the story and is sometimes more heavy-handed and plodding than Volume I, watching the films together provides a compelling, virtuoso, sometimes difficult to handle but blisteringly effective and intelligent look at sexual compulsion and its consequences.

Von Trier's middle-period muse, Gainsbourg, gives a stellar performance and she is ably supported by newcomer Stacy Martin who plays Joe's younger self. The odd casting choices - Shia LaBeouf spouting his lines in some sort of horrid Dick van Dyke-style cockney accent, Christian Slater as Joe's father and Jamie Bell as an S&M master - do not annoy as much as they might because of the strength of Gainsbourg, Skarsgard and Martin, who share the majority of screen time between them.

Whatever its faults, Nymphomaniac cements Von Trier's reputation as the most talented filmmaker of his generation, even if it only reaffirms how much you hate him. For those who love him, the films are another reason to remain devoted.

• 'Nymphomaniac Volume I' and 'Volume II' at cinemas nationwide