Needing a lusty American lad to boost the international sales potential of his upcoming “Nymphomania,” the Danish agent provocateur Lars Von Trier has lighted upon Shia LaBeouf to play, presumably, an object of desire for Charlotte Gainsbourg’s highly promiscuous protagonist. Another American, Willem Dafoe, who starred with Gainsbourg in Von Trier’s controversial “Antichrist,” had already joined the cast.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, the 26-year-old LaBeouf is currently in talks for the picture. It will also feature Nicole Kidman, who told the French movie magazine Positif that she will do “a few days” filming on the project. Kidman had one of her most arduous experiences working with Von Trier as the sexually enslaved Grace in “Dogville.”
“Nymphomania” is due to start filming in September near Cologne. As previously reported here, the movie will relive the amorous escapades of the Gainsbourg character, from age zero through fifty, as recounted by her to her husband (Stellan Skarsgård).
It will be shot in two feature-length parts. “It is a big operation,” Von Trier’s producer and Zentropa partner Aalbæk Jensen told Screendaily (paywall site) back in April. “I personally hope that we should be ready for Cannes next year. We will shoot both and edit both – and we want to finish both at the same time.” The first part will deal with the main character’s sexuality in childhood and adolescence, the second part will deal with her adulthood.
Von Trier intends to present softcore and hardcore versions of the two-parter. “We will probably blur the central points of the human body for the release worldwide but we will probably make one unblurred that will be for screening, maybe in Cannes,” Jensen said.
It will be shot, like “Melancholia,” “in a mixed style,” Jensen added. “Some will be Dogme hand-held and some will have very carefully made photography, crane shots and beautiful images.”
The casting of Kidman and Dafoe confirms Jensen’s belief that the clumsy “Nazi” remarks Von Trier made (and later retracted) during his 2011 Cannes press conference for “Melancholia” has not diminished his standing with actors. “His value for [them] to work with him has never been better,” Jensen said in the Screendaily interview.
One wonders why Von Trier is restricting the film to two parts. Should he wish to follow Peter Jackson, who is now expanding “The Hobbit” into three movies, he could shoot a third part that follows the “Melancholia” heroine’s life as a “GILF,” in the novelist Martin Amis’s parlance – “G” standing for “grandmother.”