His early movies, made under the aegis of the Dogme manifesto, were put together according to a set of self-imposed rules. Yet even in the post-Dogme era, he tends to impose a clear structuring principle on his features. In Nymphomaniac the ruling trope is ‘the picaresque’ – a tale of a clever, roguish adventurer told in a series of episodes. Think, for instance, of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, or Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders.