Enter the Void. (18.)
Directed by Gasper Noe. 2009.
Starring Nathaniel Brown, Paz de la Huerta, Cyril Roy, Olly Alexander, Masato Tanno and Sara Stockbridge. Out on Blu-ray from Arrow Video. Director’s Cut. 154 mins. UK theatrical cut. 137 mins.
This was my third time around with Noe's should've-been-masterpiece, a hallucinogenic swirl of life, death, love, pain and the meaning of existence, all fuelled by drugs, squalor and sex, set in a toytown Tokyo, and I still can’t get it to fly for me. The start of the film always gets you, thrilling you with its formal daring but the world of possibilities it throws open soon close up into the same old, same old. Most of your initial enthusiasm will likely have been used up by the halfway point.
Probably the most obvious thing to say about it is that it's another Noe project that fails to live up to its opening title sequence. This is fantastically confrontational, a rapid epileptic blur of flashing images supporting title cards in a variety of fonts that spend so little time on the screen that you have to try and take them in subliminally. It’s so good the film has two cracks at it, each lasting just over a minute. It’s abrasive, oppressive and, of course, makes you bolt up in your seat. It taunts you with the wonders that are to follow and however many times you see it, it gets you pumped for what is to follow.
The film is centred around an orphaned American brother and sister, Oscar (Brown) and Linda (Huerta), who have wound up in this fantasy Tokyo, she stripping in a nightclub, he drug dealing. Oscar starts the film by taking a hallucinogenic in his room but his evening is ruined by a client phoning to demand he meets him in a bar called The Void. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that it's a rendezvous that doesn't work out well for him.
Instead of character development, the film has camera position development. It starts out as Oscar’s point of view; shifts to the view from behind the back of his head, before being set free to zip around offering a hyperactive fly on the wall, in the sky, in the gutter view. It is in the gradual distancing from its central character that the film loses its intensity. When Oscar is the camera the film has a focus. After that it loses its discipline.
For the first third the film seems sensational but it wears you down: every point, every idea is repeated over and over again until Noe has effectively hammered all the wonder out of the film. In the last hour plus the film just keeps flying around above the buildings of Toytowntokyo, dipping in on a character or a conversation and then bouncing away to go and see what's happening elsewhere. The problem is that not much is happening anywhere so the film is constantly in search of some action, but failing to find any.
The perversity of this 21st Century Head movie is that this trippy odyssey is fantastically literal-minded. At the very start, Oscar's mate gives him a copy of The Tibetan Book of the Dead and then explains it to him at length until the penny has dropped with every member of the audience. Throughout the film, there is never a moment when you won't know what is happening or what is likely to happen in the future. This doesn't foreshadow as much as fore-bludgeon.
Still, it should be recognised what an extraordinary visual experience it is and done on a comparatively small budget. It’s unlike anything you’ve seen before, even though it’s just like lots of things you’ve seen before: the Star Gate sequence from 2001, Wings of Desire and the work of David Lynch are all liberally borrowed from. The visualisations of Oscar’s trip resemble the calamari spaceships of Matrix Revolutions.
Simplistic and repetitive, gaudy and glittering, there’s something of children’s TV to it, an X rated Cbeebies. It's self-indulgent but perhaps that was unavoidable. This model village Tokyo with its roving camera that can fly anywhere and see-through walls is surely one of the greatest train sets any man's ever had to play with.
The director’s cut is simply the restoration of reel 7 (of 9) that was cut for the theatrical release. Noe claimed at the time that nothing much happened in it so it could be cut without being missed but there are some quite significant moments in it.
High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentations
• Original lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and PCM 2.0 stereo soundtracks
• Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• Enter the Sensorium, a brand new visual essay on the film by author and critic Alexandra Heller-Nicolas
• Brand new video interview with typography designer and long-term Noé collaborator Tom Kan
• 8 deleted scenes
• Archival Making of – Special Effects featurette
• Archival Vortex featurette
• Archival DMT Loop featurette
• French and international theatrical trailers
• 8 teaser trailers
• 3 unused trailers
• Image gallery
• Limited edition packaging with a reversible sleeve featuring two choices of artwork
• Illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Jon Towlson and Rich Johnson, and an oral history of the film by Steven Hanley
• Fold-out double-sided poster featuring two choices of artwork
• Six double-sided, postcard-sized artcards.
Directed by Gasper Noe. 2009.
Starring Nathaniel Brown, Paz de la Huerta, Cyril Roy, Olly Alexander, Masato Tanno and Sara Stockbridge. Out on Blu-ray from Arrow Video. Director’s Cut. 154 mins. UK theatrical cut. 137 mins.
This was my third time around with Noe's should've-been-masterpiece, a hallucinogenic swirl of life, death, love, pain and the meaning of existence, all fuelled by drugs, squalor and sex, set in a toytown Tokyo, and I still can’t get it to fly for me. The start of the film always gets you, thrilling you with its formal daring but the world of possibilities it throws open soon close up into the same old, same old. Most of your initial enthusiasm will likely have been used up by the halfway point.
Probably the most obvious thing to say about it is that it's another Noe project that fails to live up to its opening title sequence. This is fantastically confrontational, a rapid epileptic blur of flashing images supporting title cards in a variety of fonts that spend so little time on the screen that you have to try and take them in subliminally. It’s so good the film has two cracks at it, each lasting just over a minute. It’s abrasive, oppressive and, of course, makes you bolt up in your seat. It taunts you with the wonders that are to follow and however many times you see it, it gets you pumped for what is to follow.
The film is centred around an orphaned American brother and sister, Oscar (Brown) and Linda (Huerta), who have wound up in this fantasy Tokyo, she stripping in a nightclub, he drug dealing. Oscar starts the film by taking a hallucinogenic in his room but his evening is ruined by a client phoning to demand he meets him in a bar called The Void. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that it's a rendezvous that doesn't work out well for him.
Instead of character development, the film has camera position development. It starts out as Oscar’s point of view; shifts to the view from behind the back of his head, before being set free to zip around offering a hyperactive fly on the wall, in the sky, in the gutter view. It is in the gradual distancing from its central character that the film loses its intensity. When Oscar is the camera the film has a focus. After that it loses its discipline.
For the first third the film seems sensational but it wears you down: every point, every idea is repeated over and over again until Noe has effectively hammered all the wonder out of the film. In the last hour plus the film just keeps flying around above the buildings of Toytowntokyo, dipping in on a character or a conversation and then bouncing away to go and see what's happening elsewhere. The problem is that not much is happening anywhere so the film is constantly in search of some action, but failing to find any.
The perversity of this 21st Century Head movie is that this trippy odyssey is fantastically literal-minded. At the very start, Oscar's mate gives him a copy of The Tibetan Book of the Dead and then explains it to him at length until the penny has dropped with every member of the audience. Throughout the film, there is never a moment when you won't know what is happening or what is likely to happen in the future. This doesn't foreshadow as much as fore-bludgeon.
Still, it should be recognised what an extraordinary visual experience it is and done on a comparatively small budget. It’s unlike anything you’ve seen before, even though it’s just like lots of things you’ve seen before: the Star Gate sequence from 2001, Wings of Desire and the work of David Lynch are all liberally borrowed from. The visualisations of Oscar’s trip resemble the calamari spaceships of Matrix Revolutions.
Simplistic and repetitive, gaudy and glittering, there’s something of children’s TV to it, an X rated Cbeebies. It's self-indulgent but perhaps that was unavoidable. This model village Tokyo with its roving camera that can fly anywhere and see-through walls is surely one of the greatest train sets any man's ever had to play with.
The director’s cut is simply the restoration of reel 7 (of 9) that was cut for the theatrical release. Noe claimed at the time that nothing much happened in it so it could be cut without being missed but there are some quite significant moments in it.
High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentations
• Original lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and PCM 2.0 stereo soundtracks
• Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• Enter the Sensorium, a brand new visual essay on the film by author and critic Alexandra Heller-Nicolas
• Brand new video interview with typography designer and long-term Noé collaborator Tom Kan
• 8 deleted scenes
• Archival Making of – Special Effects featurette
• Archival Vortex featurette
• Archival DMT Loop featurette
• French and international theatrical trailers
• 8 teaser trailers
• 3 unused trailers
• Image gallery
• Limited edition packaging with a reversible sleeve featuring two choices of artwork
• Illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Jon Towlson and Rich Johnson, and an oral history of the film by Steven Hanley
• Fold-out double-sided poster featuring two choices of artwork
• Six double-sided, postcard-sized artcards.
