A man returning from a small convenience store finds a woman lying—torpid and bleeding—in a sepulchral courtyard. She refuses medical care, refuses the police, but will accept a cup of tea, and goes with him to his apartment. After getting cleaned up, she rests in his bed and tells him the story of her life, which is mainly the story of her sex life.
Throughout the telling, the quietly fanciful Joe, a sort of erotic Scheherazade, intently affirms a vague and unnamed guilt that the polymathic scholar Seligman tries to reason her out of. Young-adult Joe is played by Stacy Martin. In her independent life, Joe often took as many as ten lovers in a single night. Some of them are young, some old; some handsome, some plain; some fit, some flabby; some stylish, some lumpish. Von Trier is the best advertising person in the movie business, and he has come up with a movie that is an ingenious commercial for itself.
The only stumbling block is love. Love, as detailed by Joe and as shown in a variety of episodes throughout the film, is the curse that gets in the way of pleasure. Along the way, he offers repellently racist words and gags along with a sophistical endorsement of them; a definition of a good Jew wanna guess? II that any attempt to defer or deflect immediate sexual gratification is a mortification that leads swiftly to a total monastic repudiation of life itself.
The very notion of pleasure itself is one that escapes him. Actually, there is one sequence that von Trier films with care and passion. That quest for punishment dangles, throughout Vol. But Vol. II, that quest will entail pain. The masochistic relationship is what von Trier films with an almost palpable sense of excitement. And the woman finds that punishment just and apt, not requiring redress of any sort. It turns out that there is a tea stain on the wall—Joe has put it there, and Joe reads it.
Von Trier does reveal another aspect of his pleasure—the pleasure of storytelling. He is an irrepressible filmmaker whose creative energy has been diverted to a need to vent, a brilliant rhetorician who packages his rant in the terms that his art-house audience, finding transgression in the mere quantity of sex and seriousness in the overtly intellectual discussion, will snap up. Not for nothing does the movie run on the metaphor of fly fishing—of the crafted adornment that, by imitating life, fools fish into swallowing the hook.
