Enter The Void. The title can pretty much describe Gaspar Noe as a director. His previous films have been dark, wet places where bad things happen, things that stare back at you and darken up your soul for having watched them. Take the infamous Irreversible, which took the current biggest actors-in-their-prime in France (Vincent Cassel and Monica Bellucci in France, who happened to be married in real life) and had the former commit one of the most graphic onscreen murders I have ever seen (a fire extinguisher to the head of a prone man) and the other raped in long take for about nine single-take painful minutes. So yes, his ‘audacious credentials’ are well established and we are used to grimy, ugly and difficult to watch cinematography.
So colour me surprised to see him make a beautiful, gliding, movie that never puts off the viewer, but invites them along for the ride. As it stand this is my favourite film caught at the Toronto Film Festival, and perhaps my favourite of the year. It not only offers a unique view of Tokyo, but also tells one of those mega-sized ambitious stories that Stanly Kubrick chews on. Call it the fusion of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Eyes Wide Shut served up as the biggest ‘bread and circus’ act of arthouse cinema I’ve ever witnessed.
You don’t watch this movie, you experience it; playing the ultimate in cinematic voyeur, looking out of the main characters eyes, getting high in his apartment and then ambling out to do a drug deal. The POV camera is complete with ‘blinking’ (a very convenient, even elegant, way for Noe to hide his cuts. After all this would also be his version of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, a film made to look like a single unbroken cut. Except here the film is nearly 3 hours long and when our main character is shot, it is his ‘spirit journey.’ This is not an interpretation or even subtle, it is indicated specifically by the Tibetan book on the afterlife the central character is reading before he starts his drug-trip and subsequence shedding of his mortal coil. With the camera now ‘attached’ to the liberated ghost, it allows for not only strange and unusual places for the movie to go: inside of light sources, up through the sky into an airplane then back down into a taxi, or even into other peoples heads, but it also allows for a connect the dots narrative which illustrates the karma of how our ‘guide’ got offed in the first place. Ladies and gents, here is another facile (and incomplete) pitch-quote for the film: Rope meets Waking Life.
Some may say that Noe’s stories are simple, even banal, exercises in narcissism; obvious A to B incidents hidden by extreme film-making technique and narrative trickery. I think simple stories (and Enter the Void is as fundamental and basic as they come when you boil it down) can be told with technique to offer an experience. Take the films of Quentin Tarantino or the Wachowski’s The Matrix, nothing new storywise (plots are clichéd and familiar) yet the technique makes them so damn good.
You can think or not while watching the pulsating lights, the eerie CGI fractals, hyper-sexuality (enhanced as POV or gliding tableaux) or the busy beauty of Tokyo at night (both the city and a fluorescent to-scale model owned by a minor character that also gets its interiors explored to dazzling effect). But this film offers such a rich and bold visual experience (laser Pink Floyd can be officially retired at this point) that when I finally win the lottery, I am going to invest the millions of dollars into retrofitting Enter The Void into the first properly realized 3D film. If only resources and logistics would have allowed for Noe to make this film in 3D it would be the first one to use it as a narrative technique. As it stands, in glorious 2 dimensions, it is still the best film of the year.
As one who regularly goes to the movies, cinema is my drug, Noe’s trip is one of the most pleasant in some time. It grabs at beauty, pain, boredom, intensity, relaxation, violence, death and finally rebirth. It equates the suckling of a cigarette to the suckling of a nipple, things are plunged into each other, not the least of which are the reflected light from the screen directly into your eyeballs.
I do not expect a film as wild and unconventional to see a wide release anytime soon, but it is one that will suffer immeasurably on DVD or even Bluray. It demands as big a screen possible and as little distraction as possible to take it in. Ride the roller coaster other people, Enter The Void is the experience offered by Ralph Fiennes in Strange Days. Noe is the Santa Claus of the subconscious. Until I can view this again, my money is riding on the ‘lotto 649′ in the meantime.
A love song to Noe from one of my favourite writers, Kim Morgan
http://sunsetgun.typepad.com/sunsetgun/2009/09/-i-stand-firm-dix-ans-apr%C3%A8s.html
Had a great afternoon of movie watching with Kurt and finally caught up with Enter The Void, my first ever Noe film. Everything the Matts and Kurt have said about are true, this is an event experience unlike anything that has come before (Kubrick’s 2001 is compressed into the first drug high of the movie)… it goes on forever, and at moments I felt a bit of a lag, but still my eyeballs have never been this worked over. And it is not all flash, there is a lot of emotional weight by the end of it, it made me feel miserable but misery is an emotion all the same. Anyone that has a vested interest in the art of cinema ought to see this film… just beware that it will probably push some of your buttons along the way.
I just caught this and well…
I think it is an absolute piece of shit, in fact one of the biggest pieces of shit I have ever witnessed. Is the camera work impressive? Frequently, yes it is. But so much of it is filler or repetitive, ie, diving into every single flame or lamp or light source it can find.
The performances are absolutely wooden, the dialogue is moronic, the characters are detestable, the whole thing plays like one of those montages you get at HBO seasons where it goes back and forth between characters while some song plays, except now its flying in between uninteresting characters in what is really a basic bullshit boring story with no depth or emotion. And that score gets really grating eventually.
And then theres the several minutes of fucking with glowing cocks and vaginas, which just plays like a Tool video mixed with porn combined with the exploding crotches at the end of the new Lonely Island/Akon “I Just Had Sex” video
So overall fuck this movie, pretentious garbage, and I wish I was one of the 4 or 5 people who walked out.
as one person wrote of this wankfest
“Gaspar Noe shoots his load all over the audience, literally”
and I can totally see how this could not work for someone not on the same wavelength of Noe… not everything worked for me, and I found much of character stuff deliberatly artificial… a lot of DePalma set piecing, and self awareness (his dealer’s name is Gaspar, the constant emphasis on dvds). he Tibetan book stuff feels comedic, like Von Trier black humor. Despite all the artifice the movie does build to some moments where I felt the monumental Noe was trying for
well i actually quite enjoyed the film for the first 10 minutes or so, even with its faults right there ready to be followed through upon. I actually think visually the film peaks with his first drug trip before he goes out and that it’s all downhill from there.
Overall I see all that camera work and I feel like Noes abilities there have been wasted on a bad story and other bad ideas and lame attempts at shock value. Abortion… lots of sex to the point the film is way more Enter the Vag than Void.
I kind of think the film would have been better off if the story with the sister had been outright abandoned and the entire film had been just checking in all over the city, and not just the dirty stuff, I mean karaoke bars, tourist traps, everything… what this film chooses to focus on just feels juvenile, like some dumbass teenager just listed off what he’d look in on if he was a ghost..
It made me think of how much I hate Equilibrium because it feels like a dumb teenager who just read 1984 wanted to write a sci fi action movie… this feels like a dumb horny teenager saw 2001 on drugs and decided to make the drug factor more prevalent and get some boobs in there so people wouldn’t be bored. Ick.
I genuinely think Noe is working in the gutter and hoping the pseudo-spiritual bullshit and fancy camera angles will mask the fact that he made a porno movie.
Well upon second viewing I can say that for me, it remains a masterwork, and an utterly compelling and unique piece of cinema. That is to say, it totally held up when watching it again. I also dig that the entire film takes place between the title card, the first-taste of drugs is delivered by a dealer named GASPAR, and that the film may well have been simply a drug trip and not a literal ‘spirit floating in the sky’ -> there is a drug that is constantly mentioned that gives a time-dilated completely realistic but equally hallucinogenic and yet still narrative-stable high, which really is what this film is. I’ll go on record in saying that I liked all the performances.
Enter the Void’s actors make every Sam Worthington action movie performance look Oscar worthy.
I mean… when people ask me about this movie, if spared for time, all I can really say about it is… its… stupid. The movie is just plain stupid.
There is a difference between BORING and HIGH.
Admittedly ETV is not for everyone, but It’s also not as stupid as people give it credit for….For me it is the experience above the brains for the film, but I do not feel the film lacks brains or sly commentary on cinema and cinemagoing, and for that matter, human behavior. Take the scene where Oscar and Linda are on the roller coaster, and it is intercut with the car crash. I find it a fascinating scene pairing, not only because it is effective as a jolt, but far more the odd human thing to take pleasure by flirting with the sensation of danger. Two kids that survived a severe car crash taking delight on a rickety rollercoaster is just that image. We move on, people move on, re-incarnate and recalibrate every day. The human animal is surprisingly malleable.
The car crash was a jolt the first time, but like so much in the film, it got repeated to the point where it no longer had any (no pun intended) impact
The length and repetition does lull you into a state (either asleep or meditative) and the technique reminds me of Waking Life, not just the drifting across the city aspect, but the callbacks, and here visual take the place of dialogue to push you past the cognitive reasoning aspect and give in to the current. I would say mid-way I was feeling like you Goon, frustrated with the repetition, the going round and round, but I don’t know, it wore me down, I let my eyeballs do the thinking and by the end I was deep in it and it was intense. I had the same experience with INLAND EMPIRE too.