Enter the Void. Written by Gaspar Noé & Lucile Hadzihalilovic. Directed by Gaspar Noé.
A lot of nasty names have been flung at the work of the Argentine-born French director Gaspar Noé: nihilist, brutalist, “the new extremity.” The bulk of his reputation rests on Irreversible (2002), a tale of revenge that unfolds in reverse chronological order during the course of a single day. The technical brilliance of Noé’s visualization—his masterly control of point of view as his camera hurtles, swirls, and swoops above the streets of Paris—has been widely praised.
But what most people remember is the scene where the heroine (Monica Bellucci) is brutally and explicitly raped in a highway underpass. The shot lasts nine long, excruciating minutes, and though it is brilliantly performed by Bellucci and Jo Prestia—and is made doubly effective by the fact that Noé’s camera stops moving—this unflinching treatment of horror has been blasted as “self-indulgent”, “voyeuristic”, “traumatizing”. Casual viewers beware: the Noé theater is not for everybody. But for those who are willing to follow him over the edge, Irreversible is one of the handful of truly visionary films in the last twenty years. Want to bet Goya and Bosch were called “self-indulgent” and “traumatizing” in their times too?
Noé’s follow up, Enter the Void, didn’t reach screens in Europe until seven years later. As cosmic as his concerns seemed in 2002 (Irreversible’s French title is Le temps détruit tout, “Time Destroys Everything”), his new film is more ambitious in every way. A year and a half was spent just in perfecting the trippy visuals—something one usually hears in connection with some James Cameron opus, not an art-house product.
Noé’s camera is again weightless, barely ever seeming to touch the ground as it floats above a phosphorescent, Blade Runner-ish vision of modern Tokyo. The point of view this time belongs to Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), a young foreigner with a burgeoning narcotics business. When Oscar is shot during a botched drug bust, the camera sticks with him after his death, its point of view literally becoming Oscar as slips through walls, through past and present, even into other peoples’ brains. The afterlife, it appears, closely follows the Tibetan Book of the Dead, wherein the spirit wanders, visiting and revisiting the key junctures in its mortal life until it either transcends the cycle of suffering or chooses the opportunity of its reincarnation. If this sounds like an occult documentary on The Learning Channel, rest assured that Noé’s spectacle is both burn-up-the-screen visual and kick-in-the-gut visceral. To perpetuate the drug theme--it is like mainlining pure cinema.
There are a few things we might compare this to, but just a few. The obliquity of the visuals is faintly Lynchian; Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly also did wonders with the subjective, “first person” gaze. Years before that, in the brilliant last ten minutes of The Passenger, Michelangelo Antonioni’s camera literally became Jack Nicholson’s transmigrating soul. Noé himself has professed admiration for the virtuosic use of tracking shoots and POV in Mikhail Kalatozov’s 1964 cult masterpiece, I Am Cuba.
But the real inspiration for Noé’s ultimate trip is his hero Stanley Kubrick—specifically the last sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where a weightless Keir Dullea is given a grand tour of all space and time by some omnipresent, never-glimpsed intelligence. Like Kubrick, Noé yearns to make movies that are not just busy with incident, not filmed 19th century novels about who-did-what-to-whom, but remarkable for what is on the screen. (Indeed, Irreversible is full of 2001 references, not least when Albert Dupontel, playing a professional philosopher, channels his inner ape-man by bashing in someone’s head with the butt of a fire-extinguisher.)
At more than two and a half hours long, Enter the Void has the feel of a movie that contains more ideas than its maker was willing to part with. The pace of it seems calibrated not to my comfort or yours, but to some clock only Noé carries. Others may be put off by the way Oscar’s ghost seems to ogle the sexual goings-on of his sister Linda (played by a torrid Paz de la Huerta)—though the nascent incestuousness of their relationship is amply framed by the script. Noé’s drug trip imagery, a half-organic, half-galactic kaleidoscope of rippling colors and pulsating tendrils, is eye-popping, but may strike some as outtakes from Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Most challenging of all, the protagonist’s face is barely glimpsed here (once, in a mirror); some viewers will have trouble finding empathy for the back of a character’s head.
For those people, God gave us The King’s Speech. For the rest of us, this why we got into film in the first place.
© 2011 Nicholas Nicastro
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