The title promises a scandal and then, with a straight face, hands you a seminar. Nymphomaniac: Vol. I is Lars von Trier at his most mischievous: a confession about a life of desire that keeps stopping to talk about fly-fishing, prime numbers and Bach. Charlotte Gainsbourg narrates, Stacy Martin lives it out in flashback, and the whole provocation turns out to be far more cerebral than its poster would let you believe.

The frame is pure von Trier. A bookish bachelor named Seligman, played with monkish patience by Stellan Skarsgard, finds a woman beaten and unconscious in an alley behind his flat. He takes her in, makes tea, and asks how she came to be there. Her answer is her whole erotic biography, told in chapters, and every time she reaches for a metaphor he corrects it with an analogy of his own: the strike of a trout, the Fibonacci sequence, the voices of a polyphonic chorale. Sin gets cross-examined by the humanities.

A life told in chapters

Stacy Martin, in a fearless screen debut, plays Joe as a young woman who treats appetite as a vocation. We watch her discover her body as a child, run a game of seduction with a friend across the carriages of a train, and gather a “little flock” of lovers she rations by the throw of a die. Von Trier organises it all like chapter headings in a novel, and he lets Seligman’s interruptions puncture the erotic charge on purpose. Just when a scene threatens to become titillating, a diagram appears on screen and the film starts lecturing again.

Charlotte Gainsbourg in Nymphomaniac: Vol. I — Nymphomaniac: Vol. I

That tension is the movie’s real engine. Visually this is a cooler, plainer von Trier than the ravishing Antichrist or the operatic Melancholia — handheld, grey, almost clinical — because he wants the ideas, not the images, to seduce you. The split screens, the on-screen mathematics and the deadpan cutaways to Skarsgard’s fishing tackle are jokes as much as they are structure, and they keep reminding you that a man is deciding how a woman’s story gets told.

The performances

Gainsbourg gives the older Joe a voice worn down to gravel and guilt, and Martin matches her without ever asking for our sympathy. But the film’s peak belongs to a guest. Uma Thurman arrives for a single scene as Mrs. H, a wife who marches her three small sons into her rival’s flat to be shown “the whoring bed” where their father now sleeps. It is funny, monstrous and unbearable in equal measure, an entire abandoned marriage compressed into a few minutes, and it is the best acting in either volume. Around them, Skarsgard’s Seligman stays gentle and genuinely curious, the rare male listener in a von Trier film who is not there to punish anyone.

Stacy Martin in Nymphomaniac: Vol. I — Nymphomaniac: Vol. I

More provocation than pornography

Anyone arriving for the shock will leave puzzled. For all the noise around it, the film is relatively restrained; the explicit inserts are brief and oddly unerotic, and von Trier is far more interested in female desire as a moral problem than as a spectacle. It is a sensitive, sometimes genuinely tender study of a woman who refuses to apologise for what she wants, and it keeps rubbing poetry up against the plainly carnal to see which one flinches first. If there is a fault, it is that a film this eager to be dangerous ends up a little timid — but provocation-as-bait has always been part of the Dane’s craft.

It helps to know where the picture sits. This is the closing panel of von Trier’s loose “Depression Trilogy”, after Antichrist and Melancholia, and it was split into two volumes simply because the whole thing ran too long; a roughly five-and-a-half-hour cut has surfaced only at festivals. Volume I is the livelier, wittier half — the coming-of-age of an appetite — while the darker reckoning is saved for Volume II.

Our opinion

Years on, Nymphomaniac: Vol. I plays less like a provocation and more like a puzzle box: playful, intellectually greedy, and anchored by performances — Gainsbourg’s exhaustion, Martin’s nerve, Thurman’s fury — that are far better than the film’s reputation for smut suggests. It is not the best thing von Trier has made, and it can mistake a footnote for a feeling, but it is the stronger of the two volumes and one of the few films willing to argue that desire deserves the same seriousness we give grief. Come for the scandal if you must; stay for the seminar.