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Enter the Void (2009)

Director: Gaspar Noé

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From Time Out London

The French-Argentinian filmmaker Gaspar Noé doesn’t do subtlety. He’s experimental in some ways; in others, he has the refinement of Michael Bay. His last film, 2002’s backwards-told tale ‘Irréversible’, is remembered for its scenes of skull-crushing and rape. Which is a shame because it’s also worth recalling its technical daring – especially its illusion of long, whirling takes – and ability to hold a vice-like grip on you while telling a story of revenge gone wrong during one nasty night in Paris.

‘Enter the Void’ is Noé’s third feature and his first since the storm of ‘Irréversible’. It’s a more ambitious, unwieldy project: an equally kinetic attempt, with added special effects, to capture the spirit of a city, Tokyo, and a dead young American, Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), whose ghost floats about in a vaguely Buddhist manner after being shot dead by cops soon after smoking the drug DMT.

Death – and maybe the DMT – cause Oscar (and so us: this is first-person cinema) to revisit the events leading to his death.We see how he started selling drugs to pay for his sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta) to join him in Tokyo; how she became a stripper; how he was screwing a friend’s mum; how that friend grassed on him. The seedy is the everyday. We travel further too: to Oscar’s childhood and an accident that orphaned him and his sister.

When ‘Enter the Void’ first showed at Cannes last year, it was more than three hours long. But Noé has reached for the scissors and cut about 45 minutes, reducing the length of scenes in which the screen breaks out into fractals, echoing the look of submarine life or human capillaries or, if you’re unkind, those posters which you stare at until an eagle appears.

If you thought the camerawork in ‘Irréversible’ induced nausea, wait until you get a dose of ‘Enter the Void’. We swing in and out of buildings, tear through walls. Not only that, but we leap into the cabin of a plane and take a vagina’s eye view of a penis during sex. There’s nowhere Noé’s camera won’t go, and as his version of Tokyo is a pit of sex and drugs, we’re never far from a flash of flesh or a dose of dope.

Much about ‘Enter the Void’ is rotten. The acting stinks. Noé drops facts like lead balloons (‘Hey, have you read “The Tibetan Book of the Dead”?’). Characterisation is weak. The use of Bach’s ‘Air on a G String’ is lazy and emotionally the film is as shallow as a declaration of love on E.

But you have to admire Noé’s ballsy vision and loopy execution, and the way he sucks you into this world with such a bold fusion of sound and image. It’s not a massive leap from ‘Avatar’ to ‘Enter the Void’: both care more for style over story, both reflect their maker’s odd world view. Noé, though, has no desire to please. He’d rather repel you. See where it takes you.

Author: Dave Calhoun

Time Out London Issue 2092: 23–29 September, 2010

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User reviews of this film

robert castro said...

Posted on Jan 31 2011 06:02 it is by far the best experience one can have in a packed theatre. it is not often that a film challenges you. this film, slaps you across the face because it is unlike anything ever made.

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Marcelo said...

Posted on Dec 18 2010 06:22 Masterpiece, but above all a work of art. You may love it or hate it. Dave Calhoun has no idea of filmaking as an art, perhaps he specializes mostly in film for entertainment. He sounds like a contemporary critic of Van Gogh. But hey, it´s not for everyone to love, i know i did.

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Steven Hippopotamus said...

Posted on Nov 08 2010 08:26 Phil Ince is Gaspar Noe

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Theo said...

Posted on Oct 19 2010 23:34 Surely one of the worst films of all time ever.

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Daniel said...

Posted on Oct 13 2010 01:50 I dont think the reviewer can understand more then one level of subtext.

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francky said...

Posted on Sep 28 2010 12:03 to the one who will enjoy this film,check out one STAND ALONE,of his earlier film who has english subtitles!

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Phil Ince said...

Posted on Sep 25 2010 21:19 I'm having another go.
This film won't be everyone's cup of tea but this is such an impressive film that it's difficult to describe without belitting it with hyperbole. It shows his journey after death by shooting of a young man through contemporary Tokyo and through his own life. I'd heard of Noe but not seen his films and I was anxious about what I might see.
It’s a real piece of cinema. Even the brilliant credits are powerful; they’re reassuringly funny - enormously elaborate and yet dismissive and functionless because they’re so rapidly shown. There's absolutely nothing here to frighten. Nothing to repel. I found it disoriented me in time but also by disorienting me to my familiar world, I was reoriented, too.
Some of the acting isn’t great. The main female characters - Oscar’s sister and his friend’s mother - have a scene each in which they cry. Neither is remotely convincing but it only briefly mattered because diversity in reality seems central to the film. And so much else is great that any brief weaknesses of performance are quickly unimportant and there is, if you need it, an agony communicated in the performance by a little girl who is grieving for her parents and then separated from her brother.
This is one of the most beautiful anythings, not just films, that I’ve ever seen. This is a hard film and easy because it’s so fine.

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