Directed by Lars von Trier. Starring Charlotte Gainsbourg and Stellan Skarsgård. Rated R.

Lars von Trier, the Danish director who launched the unvarnished Dogme films, has lately been staging more garishly baroque spectacles, such as Antichrist and Melancholia. The much-ballyhooed Nymphomaniac, shown in separate, two-hour “volumes”, is obviously an even grander provocation.

Being the highly detailed study of a self-abasing sex addict, it is quite graphic, even in the somewhat truncated version (90 minutes shorter) hitting these shores. But it has been assembled for minimal arousal—because nasty fucking should never look hot, right? So the viewer’s pleasures have to come from other activities on-screen.

They’re chiefly derived from the Socratic banter between an asexual Samaritan (Stellan Skarsgård) and the title character played by Charlotte Gainsbourg. She’s named Joe, presumably so the movie can end with her being asked a musical question about the gun in her hand.

Ostensibly set in England, although this is actually Germany—closer in driving distance for the travel-phobic director—things begin when this professorial fellow finds Joe beaten and bloody in a snowy alley. He takes her to tea at his desultory bedsit, and she begins her Scheherazade-like confession.

There’s not much to be gleaned from Joe’s childhood with a cold-fish mother (briefly glimpsed Connie Nielsen) and genuinely warm father, played by Christian Slater with blackened hair and an idiotic grin. The child actor here is soon replaced by cadaverous newcomer Stacy Martin, who dominates the first part. It’s difficult to determine Martin’s acting potential, since her part mostly consists of smiling enigmatically and/or staring blankly at the ceiling. The tale’s integrity is little helped by the fact that the three performers playing Joe have zero resemblance; furthermore, Shia LaBeouf, who inexplicably becomes our hormone-addled heroine’s lifelong fixation, is replaced halfway into the film’s second part, after many scenes with Gainsbourg—who has been more convincing elsewhere.

This filmmaker has never, in fact, been a fan of realism. His stories unfold like the dreams of children imitating what they imagine to be adult behaviour. Despite the seeming gravity of the subjects tackled here, his tone is largely flippant, with more attention paid to patently obvious jokes (in the early “chapters” when anyone mentions, say, quacking ducks, he cuts to stock footage of you-know-whats) than to anything like human psychology. Von Trier’s tendency to use characters as mouthpieces for his personal views on anti-Semitism or whatever, and to have others (like the cheesy crook played by Willem Dafoe) deliver banal plot exposition, does not inspire confidence, let alone lust.

Still, there’s enough ornery peculiarity to keep you from dismissing this full-frontal epic as a priapic prank. The late arrival of Jamie Bell, as an S & M specialist seemingly troubled by his work, does offer weird, sometimes funny food for thought. When Billy Elliot has the whip hand in your relationship, it really is time for an intervention.