Movie Review: Climax

Climax **** / *****

Directed by: Gaspar Noé.

Written by: Gaspar Noé.

Starring: Sofia Boutella (Selva), Romain Guillermic (David), Souheila Yacoub (Lou), Kiddy Smile (Daddy), Claude-Emmanuelle Gajan-Maull (Emmanuelle), Giselle Palmer (Gazelle), Taylor Kastle (Taylor), Thea Carla Schott (Psyche), Sharleen Temple (Ivana), Lea Vlamos (Lea), Alaia Alsafir (Alaya), Kendall Mugler (Rocket), Lakdhar Dridi (Riley), Adrien Sissoko (Omar), Mamadou Bathily (Bats), Alou Sidibé (Alou), Ashley Biscette (Ashley), Mounia Nassangar (Mounia), Tiphanie Au (Sila), Sarah Belala (Sara), Alexandre Moreau (Cyborg), Naab (Naab), Strauss Serpent (Strauss), Vince Galliot Cumant (Tito).

 

When your primary goal as a filmmaker seems to be to shock audiences, you eventually either grow out of it, or become a parody of yourself. Michael Haneke is an example of the former – his later films still can shock, but he’s not trying to shock you for shock’s sake like he was in say Funny Games and his earlier films. Bruno Dumont is an example of the latter – I can no longer tell if he’s being at all serious, or he’s just fucking with us now – daring us to take him seriously, so he can laugh at us (in a way, Lars von Trier has entered this territory as well). Then there is Gaspar Noe – who honestly, I’m not quite sure what to make of. His infamous film Irreversible (2002) of course was told backwards – starting with an extended, very violent murder, then going to show us an even more extender, violent rape sequence that explained the murder, and then went back to show us the couple – the murderer and the rape victim – before either one, when they were happy, their happiness tinged with sadness because we know what they’re about to go through. From there, he went full on virtuoso, but fairly hallow, with Enter the Void – a film whose visuals I will never forget, but I could not tell you what happened in the plot – and then Love, where he decided to use 3-D technology to shot not a porn film per se, but one with real sex. In that one, he forgot to make anything really interesting though – not the characters, or even really the sex. Fewer people seem to be scandalized by his films, because fewer of them are paying attention. But with Climax, he has made what may just be his best film. It’s not complicated film in terms of narrative or theme – but it looks and sound terrific. By Noe standards, Climax is rather tame – meaning it’s still more extreme that practically anything else you will see in a theater this year, but it probably won’t traumatize you. Here Noe seems to be having fun – and it works well for him.

 

The film takes place over one long night, in basically a big, old warehouse. In it, are dozens of members of a French dance troupe about to embark on an American tour. We get to know them – very briefly – with a couple of interview clips with some of the major players in the beginning, before Noe plunges us headlong into an extended dance number – shot, brilliantly, in one long take. The energy and joy of this dance number haunt the rest of the movie in a way – because while there will be more dancing throughout the film, there will be a lot less joy. You see, it becomes clear that someone spiked the sangria with acid, and almost every had some – meaning they’re now all stoned, and getting paranoid and violent. Anyone who didn’t have any becomes the object of suspicions – and those suspicions turn violent. One of the leaders brought their young son with them – and then locked him in an electrical room to protect him – but then lost the key Various other characters retreat to different, private rooms where more hedonistic excesses are going on. The rooms are lit in distinctive colors – greens, blues, reds – and the whole enterprise is flying off the rails at a quicker and quicker pace – leading to a climax which is essentially and orgy of violence and, well, an actual orgy.

 

Part of the problem with some of Noe’s previous films – as much as I admired them – was how seriously they took themselves. Climax doesn’t suffer from that problem at all. In many ways, it kind of feels like Noe having fun – experimenting, and seeing what he can do. The dance sequences in the film are remarkable – and Noe smartly decides to mostly let them all play out in one long take. This is what Stanley Donen or other classic musical directors would do – allowing the dancers to really be the starts of those moments, and not the director (although it takes great skill to do that properly as well).

 

The basic theme is something that has been explored countless time since Lord of the Flies – or in the films of Luis Bunuel, etc. – that society exists under the thin veneer of respectability, and it doesn’t take much for humans to fall back on their baser instincts and descend into chaos. So, not a new theme. But it’s one that fits Noe well, and allows him to make his best film to date – one that embraces his excesses, without making you feel like you need a shower afterwards. Noe has always had skill and ambition – and interestingly, when he dialed back the latter, it really lets the former shine. Climax is an early year highlight.

Movie Review: Love

Love
Directed by: Gaspar Noé.
Written by: Gaspar Noé.
Starring: Aomi Muyock (Electra), Karl Glusman (Murphy), Klara Kristin (Omi), Ugo Fox (Gaspar), Juan Saavedra (Julio), Aaron Pages (Noe), Isabelle Nicou (Nora), Benoît Debie (Yuyo), Vincent Maraval (Castel), Déborah Révy (Paula), Xamira Zuloaga (Lucile), Stella Rocha (Mami), Omaima S. (Victoire). 

The history of non-pornographic movies using real, un-simulated sex isn’t particularly filled with masterpieces. The gold standard is probably John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus (2006), which captured sex in all its messy, funny glory. For the most part though, when directors really want to use real sex in a non-pornographic movie with real sex, they tend to overdo it a little bit – making the films so serious, that it robs the sex of any feeling of joy. Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs for instance is a long slog – 9 sex scenes intercut with 9 concert scenes – that chart the ending of a relationship, which reduces sex to mere friction. Gaspar Noe’s Love is groundbreaking for being – as far as I know – the first one of these films to be made in 3-D – although, to be honest, that seemed fairly unnecessary to me. It almost falls into the trap that Winterbottom’s film did – reducing sex to thrusting, grunting, friction – but not quite. Some of the sex scenes are rather dull – and a bit of a slog – but he also captures the pure pleasure of sex better than most of the other films I have seen. The non-sex scenes in Love vary wildly in quality – the acting isn’t particularly great, and disappointingly, Noe doesn’t seem to have many “new” ideas about men and women – it’s yet another woman of an insecure guy who uses his girlfriend’s sexuality against her. It’s an interesting, not altogether successful film – but like everything Noe does, it is worth seeing.

The film jumps around in time, and tells the story of the doomed relationship between Murphy (Karl Glusman) and Electra (Aomi Muyock). They are already done by the time the movie opens – the result of Murphy getting another girl, Omi (Klara Kristin) pregnant. He’s now with Omi, but still cannot stop thinking about Electra – especially after he receives a phone call from her mother saying she hasn’t heard from her in a few months, and is very worried. His relationship with Omi is bad – he loves his son, but never really loved Omi – we will see in flashbacks the broken condom that was the reason she got her pregnant in the first place, as well as the threesome between Murphy, Electra and Omi that began the sexual relationship between them. That was fine with Electra – but him seeing her without her was not. And it is not the first time he has cheated on her – as the movie will eventually make clear.

In general, Love does move mainly backwards in time – starting at the end, and taking us right back to the moment Murphy and Electra had met, and first had sex. The opening scenes are the most dire – the closing the most hopeful. In this way, it resembles Noe’s Irreversible – which opened with a brutal murder, went back to the rape that inspired the murder, and ended with scenes of love. But this time, Noe doesn’t as strictly adhere to that timeline, as it jumps around in time more than most. Noe, I think smartly, doesn’t make the film nothing but a dull slog at the beginning, and save all the good stuff for the end. While some of the sex scenes in the movie are mechanical and unfeeling – they are that   way by design. And he never goes too long without giving the audience a sex that is genuinely erotic (the previously mentioned three-way is just that).

The film isn’t as groundbreaking or visually stunning as Noe’s last film – Enter the Void (a film I think I was probably a little too hard on when I reviewed it a few years ago out of TIFF). The sex scenes are well done and undeniably Noe’s work – but the rest of the film doesn’t quite live up to them. If Noe is showing us things we don’t often see before, visually, (largely, I think the 3-D is unnecessary, but it has moments where it works) – the story is as old as they come. Murphy is jealous of Electra’s sexuality – her experiences before he came into her life, as well as the things she willingly does with him – no matter whose idea they are, if they don’t go as he intended, she gets the blame. Murphy, an America living in Paris, is (according to everyone in the movie) to possessive – too American – in his attitudes towards sex and women. Noe’s ideas here aren’t really new here – and he is hampered by the performance of Glusman as Murphy, who really cannot act. The two women fair better – but Noe views them through Murphy’s lens – which is to say as objects, and not three dimensional characters, so there isn’t as much for them to play.

Noe remains an interesting director to watch – who is genuinely provocative in many ways. Yet, he also remains less of a writer than a director – marrying interesting images and ideas, with rather mundane stories. If he writes a better screenplay – or more likely got someone else to write one for him – he may well make a great film. As it stands, Love is like his other work – provocative and interesting, but also a little empty.

Movie Review: Enter the Void

Enter the Void ** ½
Directed By: Gaspar Noe.
Written By: Gaspar Noé
Starring: Nathaniel Brown (Oscar), Paz de la Huerta (Linda), Cyril Roy (Alex), Emily Alyn Lind (Young Linda), Jesse Kuhn (Young Oscar), Olly Alexander (Victor), Masato Tanno (Mario), Ed Spear (Bruno), Sara Stockbridge (Suzy).

I have to hand it to Gaspar Noe. It takes balls the size of watermelons to make a film as screwed up and daring as Enter the Void is. He had to have known that his film would alienate pretty much any audience member who ever dared to watch the damn thing, yet for two and half hours, Noe makes his dizzying, sometimes disgusting, sometimes ridiculous, always provocative film on screen and dares you to turn away. Most probably will. I, on the other hand, was enthralled.

Noe’s film is told in three distinct parts, all following the life and death of a low level drug dealer named Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) living in Tokyo. In the first part – approximately 20 minutes or so is told from Oscar’s literal point of view. The camera registers everything that Oscar sees – even registering his blinks – as he gets stoned (and hallucinates), then heads out onto the streets of Tokyo to conduct business, ending up in a disgusting toilet in a bar with the cops banging on the door before shooting him, and collapsing on the floor in a pool of his own blood.

The second part is a flashback of Oscar’s life, and everything that led him up to being in that bathroom in the first place. The camera hovers just behind Oscar – we are literally peaking over his shoulder to witness the events that shaped his life – including the brutal car accident that killed his parents, and his painful separation from his beloved younger sister Linda (who, we meet again in Tokyo, where she has become a stripper).

The third part, we are again seeing things from Oscar’s point of view, but this time after he is dead. He floats above the action, spying on his sister and his best friend Alex (Cyril Roy), who gave Oscar the Tibetan book of the dead before he died – the ideas of reincarnation contained within will certainly come into play in the film’s final act. In this part – undoubtedly the longest of the three – Oscar seems to transport himself through the lights in any given room, as the camera moves relentlessly into the light, goes a trippy, acid inspired visual montage, before coming out somewhere else entirely.

For the first two acts of the movie, I went with the movie. I realized fairly early on that this was going to be an entirely different type of movie, and that I had two choices – to give myself over to its insane visuals and narrative, or to fight it tooth and nail. Being lazy (and because I knew that if I fought the film, it would be a very long two and half hours), I picked the path of least resistance and found Noe’s visuals in the film astonishing, vibrant and original. Although I was disappointed that he chose to use this style on such a seemingly seedy, simple story, I didn’t mind because I felt like I was in the hands of a director who knew what he was doing.

Somewhere in the third act though, I lost patience. It became kind of a joke the number of times Noe and his camera “transported” itself – first through whatever lights were in the room, and later just about anything else. By the time Linda has an abortion, and we see the bloody fetus sitting in the sterile try, I was too busy wondering how long it would be before Noe used the fetus as his latest transport device (answer, about a minute), to be overly disgusted or offended by the image itself. By the time we get to the films overly long (not to mention overly literal) climax, I was passed the point of caring any longer. The film’s final sequence is an extended one (I’d say close to 20 minutes, but maybe it just felt longer than it was), as Oscar transports himself into the “Hotel Love”, where we see every character we have come across in the movie engaged in one form of sex or another. Once again though, I was too busy trying to figure out if the sex was simulated or not (it certainly looks real), to really care what Noe was trying to accomplish. By the time we get to the final couple – Linda and Alex – and Noe literally takes his camera inside Linda’s vagina for a POV shot of sex from the perspective of the vagina – complete with a cum shot that goes all over the camera – I realized that somewhere along the way, the entire enterprise had veered off into the ridiculous, and was not going to be able to recover by the films end.

Yet as ridiculous as I ended up finding Enter the Void, I cannot say that the movie is bad. True, I’m not sure even Noe really had any idea what his film means, and spent too much time trying to provoke a response from the audience (and, I might add, I don’t think he cares WHAT response he gets, as long as it’s a powerful one) and that at two and half hours, Noe goes at least one hour past the logical point of forcing an audience to endure a movie like this. But having said that, Enter the Void is also just about the most daring, most visually innovative film I have seen this year. I cannot say I much liked it – and I can honestly think of no one that I would actually recommend going to see the movie – but I also cannot say I was sorry to have seen the film. Too many directors these days play it all too safe. Say what you want about Gaspar Noe, and Enter the Void (and a lot has already been said), but play it safe, the film certainly does not.