Director: Marielle Heller
Year Released: 2015
Rating: 2.0
Fifteen-year-old Minnie (Bel Powley) lives with her Mother (Kristen Wiig) and her Mother's boyfriend Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård) in late 70's San Francisco ... and then, out of teenage curiosity, starts having sex with him behind her Mom's back. Despite its pungent sense of 'earnestness' (sniff that blood! X-marks-the-spot!) it isn't quite convincing on a human level (what Mom lets her very young daughter go drinking with her boyfriend?) and sinks to a level of being 'white trash,' rolling out scenarios one would normally find in icky Jerry Springer episodes (a relationship between a teen and a bum in his mid-thirties rarely helps the teenager or makes her grow as a person ... nor does doing acid, nor does getting pimped out by a lesbian 'friend'). It's actually rooted in the Electra Complex - Daughter competing with Mom for 'Dad's' affection - and ends with an (unlikely) 'feel-better' concluding note: it's easy for Wiig's character to be so forgiving when she's playing such an under-written and underdeveloped buffoon (while Mom is flighty and pathetic, biological Father is 'distant' and an academic). Say what you must about Von Trier's Nymphomaniac project, but he took the whole hedonism-as-a-life-pursuit to its very end (and asked major questions about pleasure ... and womanhood); this ends with Minnie selling (graphic) doodles, supposedly passionate about 'art' (that is, until she tires of it like everything else).
