Gaspar Noe's first film since his ultraviolent, commercial success Irreversible, took over 10 years to materialize. Thank God he waited to make it because I doubt the CGI could have been that great then. I had reseen Irreversible that week, this time without skipping the worst bits (I was a young teen the first time around). I loved it and thought I'd go for 'Enter the Void' the following night.
Gaspar Noe hasn't calmed down since Irreversible, and Enter the void is just as mad and ambitious, if not more.
Oscar (Nathaniel Brown, here acting for his first gig/you can tell), an American drug dealer in Tokyo is joined by his sister Linda, played by clumsy bombshell Paz de la Huerta. He's set up by a mate, and finds himself shot by the police in the toilets of a bar of a club called The Void.
Sidenote:At that point I was thinking about how it's so weird they have these haggard 'floor' toilets sometimes in Japan when most homes have these robotic Toto toilets with too many buttons with the purpose of washing, douching, drying etc... i dont even know how to use the one in my house. An example:
So Oscar is shot, leaving his stripper/hooker sister all alone in the whole world, despite promising her as kids that he would never ever leave her following the tragic death of their parents.
poor Linda, innocent and defenceless...
Instead of following her life post Oscar, we snap into a POV of his soul that leaves his body in the toilets. From then on we float about as him, like a kite, with hypnotic fluidity. We travel via light sources in Tokyo, shown here as a gigantic neon lit pinball machine that only exists by night. 'Death as the ultimate trip' one character said at the beginning, and so begins our psychedelic, nihilistic trip through the metropolis, through alleyways and flashbacks, walls and lapdances. Noe takes us in a cruelly unpredictable manner from the pornographic to the horrific, past to present, death to birth, back and forth, in cycles, throughout the whole film. The spectator quickly realizes that resistance is futile on this Freudian rollercoaster.
Like Irreversible, it is explicit and disturbing. Like nothing else that has been made before. You truly have to 'sit through it'. Noe only makes uncomfortable viewing, taking all sense of security from the spectator, visually and mentally. It was intended as a film about memory, loss and death, the after-life. Noe is asking many questions... Why do we have sex? Why do we live? What happens after we die? Are we just continually 'entering the void'? And unfortunately these questions are not going to get answered with such unbelievable characters.
The acting is pretty dreadful, apart from the little girl playing a young Linda, who is great. Paz de La Huerta sounds like she's on a dental anaesthetic (but I still love her). The moral aspect is difficult to comprehend and I've had to watch Gaspar Noe's interviews to understand major keys to the plot, but even then... he doesn't seem to quite get it himself. I am not even sure if he has a moral stance at all, or an answer. Just like we didn't know if he was pleading for revenge or accusing rape in Irreversible, we are left in Enter the void with a final scene simulating a rebirth of Oscar...from sperm to birth, literally shown on screen. Apparently Noe is not showing reincarnation but birth as one of the most traumatic experiences of them all, but reassuring also, because death leads to the original birth... Sorry what? I just don't get it.
And this confusion is certainly puzzling because Noe drops hints like nobody's business in his scripts, in big bold font for the dumb person at the back who didn't get how Freudian and deep he intended the script. In Irreversible, I seem to remember Monica Belluci's character saying: 'Hey have you read that book about how everything's already written?'and in Enter the Void, the junkie mate asked: 'Have you read the Tibetan book of the dead? It's about when your soul leaves your body...' or something to this effect.
The truth is, Noe's work feels a little adolescent. It's the drugs, the superficiality, the porn aesthetic... the simplistic yet incomprehensible psychology of it. It feels shallow all the while giving itself such grand importance... A bit like some dude on E bothering you with metaphysics in the smoking area at Fabric at 5am. The visuals and the shock factor seem intended to a an ADHD generation hooked on porn and xbox.
But it's technically fantastic. It's in Tokyo, which has me already sold. It's doing something so new with film, he's on a different scale. Noe is beyond experimental, and he's been working on this for 20 years. It makes for essential viewing, completely new propositions.
I'm so excited to see what he comes up with next. Enter the void is style over substance, sure, but it remains a masterpiece. It is a piece of art, a primal experience and these things always call for hyperboles. I can't even say why, because like I said, it's so shallow at times, so off on a human level. The characters are not believable, the plot sans queue ni tete, the sub-text transparent. But like a lot of art it's unexplainable. I have felt, for the first time since 2001:A space odyssey, as a kid, the excitement that films can show everything, cameras can go everywhere, even showing what no one could possibly want to see (a vadge's view as it's being penetrated by a CGI peen?). It is not often that blockbuster means are used with such novelty. The experience of this film is all I could have asked for.
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