Enter the Void (18.)
Directed by Gasper Noe.
Starring Nathaniel Brown, Paz de la Huerta, Cyril Roy, Olly Alexander, Masato Tanno. 135 mins.
Enter the Void offers up an hallucinogenic swirl of life, death, love, pain and the meaning of existence fuelled by drugs, squalor and some explicit sex (but almost no violence.) It is centred around an orphaned American brother and sister, Oscar and Linda, who have wound up in a fantasy Tokyo, she stripping in a nightclub, he drug dealing. It’s dopey, repetitive, boring, infuriating and filled with a certain contrary wonderment.
It is certainly an extraordinary visual experience and 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 acid trip resemble the calamari spaceships of Matrix Revolutions.
The film sidelines character development for 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 like a hyperactive fly’s eye view.
Gasper Noe is a genuinely notorious filmmaker, a noisy kid who bangs a little bit too hard to grab your attention and is a little too blunt in his expression but extraordinary anyway. Even the title sequence is confrontational, a rapid flashing blur that seems intent on inducing a fit in viewers even if they aren’t actually epileptic.
While his previous film, Irreversible, ended with a swirling title informing us that “Time destroys all things,” Enter The Void seems to want to mould its accumulation of horrors into an expression of transcendence.
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. This is transcendent head trip in which nobody is going to be left behind. 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.
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 most of the wonder out of the film. Simplistic, repetitive and set in a gaudy, glittering, model toy town version of Tokyo it’s like an X rated Cbeebies.
Directed by Gasper Noe.
Starring Nathaniel Brown, Paz de la Huerta, Cyril Roy, Olly Alexander, Masato Tanno. 135 mins.
Enter the Void offers up an hallucinogenic swirl of life, death, love, pain and the meaning of existence fuelled by drugs, squalor and some explicit sex (but almost no violence.) It is centred around an orphaned American brother and sister, Oscar and Linda, who have wound up in a fantasy Tokyo, she stripping in a nightclub, he drug dealing. It’s dopey, repetitive, boring, infuriating and filled with a certain contrary wonderment.
It is certainly an extraordinary visual experience and 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 acid trip resemble the calamari spaceships of Matrix Revolutions.
The film sidelines character development for 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 like a hyperactive fly’s eye view.
Gasper Noe is a genuinely notorious filmmaker, a noisy kid who bangs a little bit too hard to grab your attention and is a little too blunt in his expression but extraordinary anyway. Even the title sequence is confrontational, a rapid flashing blur that seems intent on inducing a fit in viewers even if they aren’t actually epileptic.
While his previous film, Irreversible, ended with a swirling title informing us that “Time destroys all things,” Enter The Void seems to want to mould its accumulation of horrors into an expression of transcendence.
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. This is transcendent head trip in which nobody is going to be left behind. 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.
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 most of the wonder out of the film. Simplistic, repetitive and set in a gaudy, glittering, model toy town version of Tokyo it’s like an X rated Cbeebies.
