Standing before a sold out crowd to introduce his latest work-in-progress at the 53rd London Film Festival, France’s most notorious director announced: “It is long. It is painful on your eyes. Enjoy the trip”. And with a perfunctory, polite round of applause, the audience entered the void.
Those familiar with Gasper Noe’s brand of extreme cinema will no doubt know what to expect – or try to guess. Isn’t it part of the thrill? Nonetheless Enter the Void is an infuriating, gruelling, punishing experience. The acting is dreadful and the philosophical dialogue laughable. Despite this, one can firmly announce: it is genius…kind of…in a demented, sadistic way.
Will the public be interested in a film devoted to exploring the transcendental moments of death based loosely on the Tibetan Book of the Dead? Rather cynically, for a film attempting to traverse this, its director does not believe in the afterlife (he said so during the Q&A). Instead, he equates our final moments to an acid trip: the ultimate one. Imagine the star-field sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but weirder and close to two and a half hours in running time.
At times it is indulgent to the point of perplexity. The stylistic flourishes involve endless floating, twisting shots over Tokyo. No matter how expertly crafted, they do begin to grate. Will the audience find an imaginary world populated by a bunch of junkies as spellbinding as its creator?
Noe’s greatest strength as a filmmaker might actually lie in his blending of computer-generated imagery with prosthetics and model work. He is a master technician. During the Q&A afterwards, he described how the film was pretty much all post-production. Painstaking efforts went into virtually every single frame. He is pushing the audio-visual boundaries of cinema to its very limits. And there’s no doubt in the future he will find some new way of harming us. Hollywood could learn something from Noe and his special effects team. The way they integrate and blend CGI, model work and prosthetics making it all seem so seamless is staggering.
Saving money for the CGI and model work, Noe chose to use unknown actors and non-professionals. It leads to some pretty ropey performances – not helped by everybody sounding stoned…even the child actors! Lead actor Nathaniel Brown, rather unfortunately, sounds like Napoleon Dynamite quite a lot of the time.
There are moments of greatness alongside moments designed to sear the retinas of the audience. It makes for a queasy ride. Stand out passages include a journey through a model construct of Tokyo at night which inter-cuts with its passengers talking in a taxi. The opening scene itself is intoxicating, neon-drenched and startling.
The old desire to shock people is still there: whether a shot of a penis ejaculating inside a woman (yes, really) to an abortion scene; or a bloody car crash, made all the more unsettling by a child actor’s intense screaming. It is not for the faint-hearted.
Noe orchestrates such a delirious and trance-inducing film experience, it jolts and terrifies when a character does something as innocent as flick on a light switch in an apartment. Imagine having a kaleidoscope attached to your face whilst riding the scariest rollercoaster ever.
Noe did mention his intention to “remix” the film one last time before it goes on general release next year. Let’s hope he trims some of the running time. Whether or not the film shall achieve the commercial success of his last movie remains to be seen. Enter the Void is full of hardcore sex, drugs and violence yet the story is little more than a collection of vignettes showing a dying man‘s life mixed with his ghost spying on the emotional aftermath of his demise. It is threadbare to say the least. There is a war going on in this film: it is between narrative-led cinema and the delirium and intensity of imagery. The latter wins.
The director has never been afraid to tackle the grand themes of life, but Enter the Void ends as little more than an exercise in audience torture punctuated with sequences of sublime beauty. The legendary film critic Pauline Kael wrote of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, as “Somewhere between hypnotic and boring.” It pretty much sums up Enter the Void too.
Rating: ★★★☆☆