MovieChat Forums > Nymphomaniac: Vol. II (2014) Discussion > How did Joe get so ugly in just a few ye...

How did Joe get so ugly in just a few years?


The casting of this movie was awful. Joe is really beautiful and delicious when young, and then, when her baby is born, after just 2 or 3 she becames ugly as hell. What on earth happened to this poor woman??? Jerome remains, on its turn, with the same face. Then, later in the movie, he gets old and joe has the same ugly face.....I think LVT really screwed up the casting in this movie, he should have either make up Gainsbourg younger or Stacy Matin older, or choose actresses with more resemblance.

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By the way, Charlotte Gainsbourg is reaaly unlucky aestethics and genetic wise: her mother is gourgeous singer Jane Birkin, but unfortunately faith gave her the looks of her father, Serge.

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what do you mean?! that's rude, man...

I think Charlotte Gainsbourg is beautiful, she's beautiful just like her mom.
However, I wish that the director would cast another actress to play Joe

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I don't find her ugly but damn 3 years later she aged 20+ years and completely changed facially? They should have fixed that timeline up a bit. Make it at least 10-15 years later... Better then 3!

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I had to wonder if her advanced ageing was something to do with her perception of her youth and beauty being lost with the loss of her sexual sensitivity, and her becoming a mother. She saw herself as being unattractive and older as she began to play a role that she felt was not her. I think as a sexual being she's aw herself as sensual and youthful, but the loss of her orgasm is like an analogy of menopause, making her feel past it, her perception of how she looks changes.

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I had to wonder if her advanced ageing was something to do with her perception of her youth and beauty being lost with the loss of her sexual sensitivity, and her becoming a mother. She saw herself as being unattractive and older as she began to play a role that she felt was not her. I think as a sexual being she's aw herself as sensual and youthful, but the loss of her orgasm is like an analogy of menopause, making her feel past it, her perception of how she looks changes.


This poster gets it. This is exactly why the older actress stepped in during this part of the film.

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Oh please, don't give this piece of garbage credit by an interpretation like that.

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Steady on, Angel and Queen. Liketearsintherain has it about right, and we don't have to analyse this as if we were studying a book in Engl. Lit. Von Trier and Gainsbourg had found each other years previously and this was, I think, the last project in their trilogy and the casting was already a done deal. There should just have been more time separating the two fictional periods. It's not difficult to overlook the differences in facial features (there are bigger suspensions of disbelief in movie culture, after all..)

While on the subject of this kind of irritation: with the two time periods in Almadóvar's 'La Mala Educación' I found it sometimes hard to keep track of who was who, because the older X (I forget the names) looked like a plausible older version of the younger Y.
And in '3096 Days' (about the real-life story of a kidnapped girl) they jumped abruptly from a juvenile girl to a thin 30-year-old playing the 18-year-old older version. Not that the 30-yr-old was the problem. Just that they should have written an intermediary pubescent girl into the screenplay, a middle version to ease the transition from dramatic kidnap phase to dramatic escape phase.

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Yeah good point. She became a mother which is traditionally seen as unattractive sexually (a resource-bound women if you're a man who wants to reproduce)

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Well, I don't think she's ugly but no other actress could convey such intensity and play mature Joe so brilliantly as Charlotte. That's why Von Trier cast her. Perhaps to show the diference between young, inexperienced Joe and sick, older Joe.

Also, she is the main actress in the Antichrist/Melancholia/Nymphomaniac trilogy.

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[deleted]

Dude, WTF. Charlotte Gainsbourg is hot. In my totally subjective opinion, hotter than Stacy Martin. There's something pretty *beep* sexy about her.

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Too much sex makes you ugly, I'm living proof!

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I agree that the age jump was quite jarring, but it's almost impossible to depict a process as slow and gradual as aging unless you pull a Boyhood and film somebody incrementally over many years.

I will vehemently dispute your claim that Charlotte Gainsbourg is ugly, however. I think she's very cute, even though she's twice my age.

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