Lars von Trier's Nympho Movie Just Knocked Itself Down a Notch

If you’re watching a Lars von Trier film, you know you’re in for some genitalia. The eccentric Danish director (he’s afraid of flying and insists on driving from Denmark to France for the Cannes Film Festival, from which he is now banned for his 2011 Nazi gaffe) isn’t just comfortable with displaying penises and vaginas on the screen— they have come to be his primary mode of sexual and political allegory. His latest film, a two-part “sex epic” titled Nymphomaniac, has been in the works for over a year. Last week, he unveiled a sexually-charged tableau of the celeb-heavy cast posing in all sorts of suggestive poses. You’ve got shirtless Shia LaBeouf posing with a suggestive fruit arrangement, Willem Defoe having his damp pants wiped by Sophie Kennedy Clark, and Christian Slater getting ready to douche (?) Charlotte Gainsbourg. I already feel uncomfortably aroused.

True to the films name, Nymphomaniac will feature almost everyone in the star-studded cast having freaky sex with each other. In the past, von Trier has used fake genitals because I doubt Charlotte Gainsbourg wanted to cut off her clitoris in real life, nor do I imagine Willem Defoe would be okay with having his penis brutally mutilated, as was depicted in Antichrist. For Nyphomaniac, von Trier has revealed that he will use digital technology to combine the actors’ tops to the pornographic action happening on the bottom.

“We shot the actors pretending to have sex and then had the body doubles, who really did have sex, and in post we will digital-impose the two,” said producer Louise Vesth. The detailed post-production work of imposing the right vaginas to the the right torsos is part of the reason Nymphomaniac wasn’t ready for Cannes this year. Instead, the red carpet will be rolled out in Copenhagen before the film’s scheduled release on Christmas. A psycho-sexual porno featuring Shia LaBeouf fake humping Charlotte Gainsbourg with someone else’s penis? Sounds like the perfect Christmas movie!