Thursday, 7 July 2011

Controversy for controversy's sake?

Enter The Void [Film Review]


Gaspar Noe's neon-lit Tokyo.
Contains spoilers.


Sex, Violence, Drugs, Death, Incest; Gaspar Noe is back and ready to get you talking.


Anybody that recognises the name Gaspar Noe will approach his films with some level of caution. Whilst most of this caution may be carried by intrigue, many may feel a slight unease towards the French-Argentine Filmmaker's work. His last feature, 2002's Irreversible, split its audience into two teams. The majority of people were freaked out by the ultra-violence the tale of revenge spawned, with the famous nine minute rape scene tending to overshadow the film itself. Others, however, were able to withstand their discomfort in order to see past the film's extreme masculine provocation and into the technical ability of its maker. Noe's camerawork is what makes his cinema so innovative, with his desire to linger; exploit and excess designed to test the audience's resilience to his explosive subject matter.


Enter The Void will no doubt split the audience in a similar way.


The film's opening sequence is breathtaking in itself and captures the fast, thumping, neon-lit essence of Noe's vision of Tokyo. 




Never before have I been so excited about a film by its opening sequence. If you can't sit through the film's over-indulgent running time then just be sure to watch this.


Noe's tale is told through anti-hero Oscar ( Nathaniel Brown), an orphaned American turned drug-dealer in Tokyo's vibrant streets. The opening of the film is from Oscar's perspective, with the camera impersonating his blinks and body movement as he smokes a bowl of DMT. The audience is quickly introduced to the hallucinatory depths of the story through vortices of dazzling colour and light, designed to depict the trip Oscar is partaking. 


Minutes in and Oscar's latest drug deal is rumbled. Shot and left to die in the toilets of Tokyo drug dive The Void, Noe's camera dives inside his body to the very depth of his soul. Oscar's spirit is now free to roam the city of Tokyo, and here Noe relishes in the opportunity to switch from room to room, building to building, past to present. As Oscar soars the skyscape we  become privy to Tokyo's seedy nightlife, with porn provoking us in almost every room. Music thumps as if inside ourselves as Oscar examines the businessmen thriving off desperate women.


Before long Oscar's out of body experience is given meaning as he begins to watch over his stripper sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta). Noe blurs the hallucinatory nightmare-porn of Oscar's afterlife in Tokyo with memories in his past, watched with the back of his head in view. This stereoscopic insight enables the viewer to explore his early relationship with his sister, as their parents are killed in a shockingly brutal car crash. This shot is projected countless times throughout the film, with its ferocity breaking up the low thumping of Tokyo's persistent sex life. It becomes clear that Oscar's obsession with his sister has incestuous tendencies (of course, this is Gaspar Noe!) and early memories of his mother too are loaded with sexual desire. Whilst images of his mother's breasts and sexual activity with her husband are used by Noe to personify Oscar's longing for her, I found them unnecessarily crude. A man can long for the presence of his mother without having to see her tits every two minutes. 


Memories; Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) with is sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta).
For me this is where the film began to lose license, as I became bored of the scenes specifically designed to cause controversy. People argue that Gaspar Noe intends to shake you up, to freak you out and to disgust you. So if I say that I was shocked, disgusted or freaked out that in someway means that the film is a success, because he won? Whilst reconstructing an abortion and zooming down onto the bloody and dead foetus may be described as daring,  I don't feel it constitutes to ground breaking cinema and in any way merits applause for Noe. It's inclusion wasn't there to further the story, it was there so people could talk about it afterwards and swoon over how brave and inventive the filmmaker is. 


The acting is terrible and the omniscient narrative, whilst innovative, is often boring. Minute after minute is thrown away on long CGI spawned lightshows. Undoubtedly pretty to marvel at, Noe takes us away from the emotion and regret at the heart of the story and therefore provokes annoyance at being slammed back into it with another sex scene. I began to find myself fast forwarding through colour pattern after colour pattern until I landed on something new.



Enter The Void propels Gaspar Noe as a master of camera movement. Never before have I seen such a pumped up experiment of shots, with a particularly memorable vaginal view of a penis entering during intercourse. The film is definitely worth viewing in order to witness the unbelievable scope that Noe has when it comes to taking his audience on an aesthetic journey. Renown for his love of extremism in his films, the crazy hallucinatory nightmare porn of Gaspar's Tokyo definitely doesn't disappoint in that sense. The length of the film, however, means that Tokyo soon becomes tedious. So much so that the shock doesn't seem to register anymore, with my patience quickly tested taboo after taboo. A lot of people will like this film because you are supposed to. Noe is offering new, quirky extreme cinema to blast holes through the dull conventions of Hollywood favourites. It is a cool film to like, and whilst asking Gaspar Noe to be less controversial, to think a little more about acting and narrative would make him way less cool and no longer Gaspar Noe, I didn't like this film.