Film: "Enter the Void" by Gaspar Noé (France)
Tuesday, January 25, 2011 at 1:06PM When Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey first premiered in 1968, it challenged the constructs of conventional filmmaking as defined by a hundred years of film before. It helped to install a new type of cinema, one in which the cinema itself was not forgotten. 2001 was a wholly unique piece of cinematic art that a generation could call their own.
Now, in 2011, things haven’t changed much in the infrastructure of films, especially among the mainstream. We’ve all seen it before: boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, girl leaves boy, boy gets girl back. Although we can’t completely do away with this archetypal story arc, we can at least momentarily put it aside for more artistically-minded projects. That is what Gaspar Noé has done with Enter the Void (2010), the anticipated follow up to the intensely controversial Irreversible (2002).
Noe is a director who has no mercy. Besides long scenes of explicit sex and exotic drug use, he implies in the film's general imagery a deeper innuendo that can have a tendency to be uncomforting, such as incest and rape. However subtle, they are nevertheless present between brother and sister Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) and Linda (Paz de la Heurta). After being put into different foster homes following their parents death, they reunite in Tokyo where Oscar, to make money, is a drug dealer. Linda is working as a stripper and sleeping with the owner. After smoking dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Oscar is shot and killed in a dirty club bathroom at a drug deal gone wrong.
"...being awe-struck by the opening-titles that make Quentin Tarantino child's play."
When Oscar is killed, he doesn't fully die. His spirit dissociates from his body and begins to float above the scene where he is able to see everything but not interact. In a possibly DMT-induced out-of-body experience, Oscar begins on the ultimate “trip,” floating over and through the buildings and lives of the people of Tokyo, witnessing first-hand the effect of his own death. Noé relies on a strict first-person point of view throughout the film. Everything Oscar sees, we see. With one-second blackouts to simulate blinking, muffled heartbeats, and interior monologue, the audience is transferred into the body of the character as if entering a dream---or is it a nightmare? We can't be sure. We can only follow the dreamscape that slowly reveals itself as a macabre ballet of sexually ambiguous undertones and brutal lucidity, all carefully woven to form a journey of the ultimate trip: dying.
Sitting there in the theatre---besides being awe-struck by the opening-titles that make Quentin Tarantino child's play---it became clear that while Noé pushes the boundaries of what might be acceptable on film in terms of sex or violence, he also does so with masterful execution. Under the dense visual aesthetic, there lies a meaningful and at times disturbing story that, regardless of its tendency to shock, is a welcomed alternative to mainstream cinema.
When the film ended, members of the audience laughed. They didn't know how to react to what they had seen. It made me think of Kubrick's 2001. Did people laugh at that too? The 1960's had 2001 as a hallmark of the power of only a camera and sheer ingenuity. Now, we have Enter the Void. I, for one, say thank you.
Reader Comments (2)
I rented this film the other day. It really is incredible and unusual. I love seeing artists create something that so fully takes advantage of its medium that it cannot be translated into another form. Nothing but film could tell this story without losing most of its impact.
Very good review. I'm learning about so many new and unusual pieces of art through students' blogs, including this one, thank you. My list of "must sees" is growing...
Editing comments, minor: watch for redundancies: "first premiered" "begins on"
We'll talk in class about whether collection nouns such as generation should take a plural or singular noun - I'd have said singular in your usage above.