colinr0380 wrote:
But to be more serious, and to relate back to a point made by zedz on Enter The Void that I would generally agree with, I think Noe's films have this ambition to be something grander than any particular story, but it seems that he has his eyes on this bigger overarching idea to the detriment of the characters and their basic situations.
To that end I don't think his films have really proved themselves smart enough yet to have really considered the implications of using easy stereotype characters as shorthands to achieve his greater goals, and aside from audiences that may be insulted by such shorthands (which again I don't think Noe has thought through enough about to have intended as such, especially since Irreversible for example brushes over so many groups from men to women, Arabs to intellectuals, as well as homosexuals with stereotypes/archetypes), it also ends up undermining some of the spectacular technical achievements and 'greater messages' that Noe may be wanting to provide.
The problem is that he keeps insisting on bringing up many of these inflammatory themes and then handling them in the most cack-handed, naive and childish manner. Maybe when he learns to care for his characters rather than just moving them around like chess pieces from one horror to another, he might make something that actually builds on the technical and visual expertise of his films, rather than just leaving the visuals to do all the work.
Add these issues to, for me, the far more problematic characteristic of Noe's work - the way that very simple (often naive) grand messages are over embellished and then repetitively bludgeoned into an audience again and again through a combination of aggressive visuals and overly drawn out running times, and you have films that should always be approached with caution and a thick skin, and not just for their 'extreme' subject matter.
In other words, megalomania, narcissism, homosexual panic and sadism. I suppose in a way it's a "powerful" vision, but so far I haven't been impressed.
Your comment about the characters as chess pieces rings true to me, and I think it's one shortcoming that keeps him from being the great filmmaker that he clearly aspires to become. Human monsters and their victims can be worthy characters, but they have to be interesting and complex monsters and victims. Look at Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer: now there's depravity with conviction and depth. Virtuoso camerawork and a non-linear narrative aren't enough, though they count for something.
However, I'm willing to give him a third chance with Enter the Void.
I would maybe take slight issue with Michael (though I respect your opinion on the film, and this is why I find Noe problematic) over the homosexual/heterosexual split in Irreversible - it feels a lot more to me as totally male at the beginning of the film moving to totally female at the end (with even in the long languid apartment scene Marcus being the potentially violent masculine presence, kissing Alex through the plastic shower curtain, adding a kind of Laura Palmer 'wrapped in plastic', already doomed sense to the scene), with sexuality used more as a kind of 'technical device' to slowly progress, or shade, from one sex to the other. This would seem to fit with the reductive display of male and female heterosexual activity in the Destricted short which seems to suggest a rather crude view of male sexuality, however it is expressed, as just being based in violence.
And that does mean that Noe has reductively juxtaposed an all gay darkly lit club against Alex's almost immaculate conception in the park surrounded by women and children playing in sprinklers - a death/life split with the tunnel being the horrific meeting point of the sexes. Female sexuality overpowered by male violence. Which unfortunately comes across as quite nasty if the homosexuality aspect is taken as a 'statement' (I also think the flowery dress soft and available female side of the film could be seen as being just as patronising and stereotypical if we applied the same logic to it!)
I should add that I don't have anything against using characters as chess pieces or cyphers in service of a bigger point - a lot of Bergman can fit into this area, though there the characters feel more well rounded with interior lives and reveal more facets as they progress through the film - but it is problematic to use rather inflammatory stereotypical character traits (and often just the single trait which serves to sketch in the entire character, a little like cut scenes in video games, which zedz's review of this new film occasionally made me think of) which then goes unexplored (just the superficial aspect of it pushed into the audience's face again and again, much like the butcher's muttering, constant, empty, ranting voiceover in Seul Contre Tous pretends at adding psychological depth without revealing anything more than a casual scan of the average letters page of the Daily Mail would!) as a kind of shorthand to jump to the bigger theme quicker. It undermines the larger goal and dulls it through repetition.
As zedz says, if you don't have any particularly deep interest in the characters then it becomes very difficult to actually care when they die and float around in limbo. Or for example due to the structuring of Irreversible Bellucci's first scene in which she appears is her rape and savage beating. We might feel some general sympathy for a character being shot and dying or going through a traumatic experience, but with a kind of detachment since we don't really have any connection to them at this point. Which I guess is meant to be the point. I think this all comes back to the 'shock break' ending of Seul Contre Tous. After an hour and a half of ranting we come to the scene of whether the butcher is going to decide to rape and execute his mentally retarded daughter, or just take her back to the hospital. What is kind of surprising about that film is how flatly the duplicate ending plays out, either way there's nothing really to celebrate or condemn about the character's actions (he doesn't 'save' his daughter, nor 'put her out of her misery'), nothing to take away except emptiness and a kind of pathetic impotence in every area of the butcher's life expressing itself in a violent lashing out.
Maybe these later films are trying to replicate a similar effect of 'nothing matters in the wider scheme of things' detachment, but perhaps that is being too charitable towards them.
I still don't want to completely write off Noe yet - like yourself I'll wait at least until I've seen Enter The Void, though zedz's write up doesn't inspire much confidence (but then I had not really been expecting any huge departure from Noe's previous films). But, kind of like Michael Bay, it is probably best just to go into the Noe film for the visual and technical aspects and ignore the half-baked adolescent posturings and philosophisings.
Exactly. It's a little like finding out the same about Luc Besson only when he directs his dream film and it is based on a script he wrote when he was 16 with few major rewrites since that time. The signs were there all along sadly.
I would like to clarify what I wrote earlier. It's not the gay sex dungeons that I have an issue with. It's how Noe uses them in the film and how he symbolizes them without bother developing anything further than what we see on the surface - that is what I find very offensive, irresponsible and vile. Noe probably thought calling the club Rectum was damn clever, like an elementary school boy boasting a new switchblade to friends.
Estonian release date has been set to 20th August. One thing that makes me worry is that the distributor's website gives it two lengths: 2 hours 17 minutes and 2 hours 35 minutes (director's cut). I'm not sure which version will be shown. I hope it's the uncut.
Last edited by eerik on Mon Aug 09, 2010 8:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Michael wrote:I would like to clarify what I wrote earlier. It's not the gay sex dungeons that I have an issue with. It's how Noe uses them in the film and how he symbolizes them without bother developing anything further than what we see on the surface - that is what I find very offensive, irresponsible and vile. Noe probably thought calling the club Rectum was damn clever, like an elementary school boy boasting a new switchblade to friends.
That's exactly Noe (and also Laugier with his Martyrs).
That's why I didn't even remember of this scene : it's just the young boy (I forgot his name) repaying Bruno by, well, you know. I didn't thought of it as irresponsible, or even offensive, just completely out of the subject, and most of all, ridiculous and laughable, especially by placing it during the end.
It's there, it's coming from nowhere, nothing explains it. It's like Noe didn't know how to make his characters come back, so he did it like this.
I don't think it's offensive, or even homophobic. But ridiculous, completely.
colinr0380 wrote:Exactly. It's a little like finding out the same about Luc Besson only when he directs his dream film and it is based on a script he wrote when he was 16 with few major rewrites since that time. The signs were there all along sadly.
The fruit machine method of creating a scenario does sound very 'Bessonian'! - a jeune fille, a méchant, a car chase, a prostitute, a hitman, and a band playing some cool music. Throw in some underwater scenes, abrupt anti-climactic endings, taciturn heroes with a deep unexpressed inner conflict and overwhelming visual stylistics and I think that could be the recipe for the ultimate Besson film.
But similarly to Noé, if you approach Besson's films with that knowledge, aware of them being sort of arrested adolescent-made films (especially apparent in the films at the moment that he is just producing), there can still be interesting elements to appreciate within those limited boundaries. For example I still like Subway, La femme Nikita, The Big Blue (and Atlantis) on those terms despite all their rather superficial profoundities.
I often think that the most revealing, and funniest, moment in all Besson's films is that moment when, after the big and supposedly wrenching climax of Subway, Christopher Lambert just wakes up lying on the ground and giggles to himself and to the audience! It's the perfect cinematic representation of "who cares about the loose threads of plot and following the story of the characters? It's only a dumb, fun movie" (or the filmic version of a "bof!" shrug) that I can think of, even if it skates a dangerously fine line of rubbing the audience's noses in the pointlessness of having tried to care about what came before.
Though of course, compared to Noé, Besson's rather trite 'messages' don't have that extra 'shock' element that can tip them over into seeming offensive.
eerik wrote:Estonian release date has been set to 20th August. One thing that makes me worry is that the distributor's website gives it two lengths: 2 hours 17 minutes and 2 hours 35 minutes (director's cut). I'm not sure which version will be shown. I hope it's the uncut.
I got a reply from the distributor, normal screenings will be the shorter version plus there will be special screenings for the uncut version. I guess I'll have to go and see them both. :-"
The BBFC have just passed the shorter version, after originally passing the longer one. Noé says that the film is intended to be shown at 25 frames per second instead of 24 fps. The shorter version runs 142:50 at 24 fps, 137:07 at 25 fps.
I suppose 25 fps is supposed to be a sign that he is placing the centre of his cinematic world in Europe, with its particular standards? Or maybe there is just too much flashing for 24fps to cope with adequetly. Possibly trying to ensure that most people see it on a digital projector where it doesn't really matter?
I'm pretty angry at the way that Noe is almost universally dismissed as juvenile and repugnant on predominantly non-cinematic grounds with little reference to the media context he is working in: The understones of cultural misogyny and homophobia that can be found in many mainstream movies, the stereotypes and idealised situations we feed young viewers to indoctrinate them in our ways of understanding the world, the complete lack of a necessity to have a concentration span longer than 1hr45min - the idea that nothing but our own ideas or images should occupy us for any longer than this.
He's supposed to be homophobic because he uses morally disgusting homosexual characters and doesn't make some clumsy justification for it by inserting a 'nice' gay character - surely that is the juvenile point of view - to think that everything in life is nicely balanced out like a clever little plot. Nonsense. Noe exposes things about our society which we don't want to know about - disgusting things that we tolerate in our midst, like rape. What is childish about that? Do people imagine that rape is not as he portrayed it in Irreversible? Do people imagine that a bisexual drugdealer has never raped a woman in a back alley?
It's not as if he ever tried to draw a link between the classification of 'gay' and immoral behaviour - there's all kinds of nasty shit going on in the films - I didn't hear anyone talking about the Philippe Nahon character from 'I Stand Alone' being a terrible representation of heterosexuality. I've met men who are almost identical to that character - you might not like them, I don't particularly, but does that mean that we can't watch a film about their lives?
e.g. 'Le Rectum' is called that not as an infantile joke, but because the main drug dealer who operates out of there is called 'the tapeworm' (tepia) - i.e. he wanted to create a character that got up inside you and made you feel sick, like a parasite. The club, a metophor for our own subconscious, is a real S&M club in Paris (by a different name), not a homophobic fiction. And the last time I checked, Gaspar Noe is bi-sexual and friends with many of the sado-masichists who appeared as extras in 'Irreversible'.
Like musicians such as 'Whitehouse' have done in the field of electronica, he is trying to make films which are not films, in the standard meaning of the word. He is not making entertainment/amusements just for people to enjoy and feel good about themselves - "I understood that complicated plot, how clever am I?" - he is simply creating an audiovisual experience which has a concentrated element of real life in it. He intends the experience to be like an audiovisual drug itself, hence the light tricks, disorientation, low-pitch sound fx etc. Noe's films are more comparible to the semi-educational films that you can see at Imax cinemas attached to science centres and cultural resorts like Epcot. They are an experience which is supposed to fascinate to a degree, educate to a degree, document reality, and create memories - not necessarily amusing ones either. You would not expect a kid in one of those presentations to be constantly stimulated and laughing or enjoying every moment. We accept that seeing underwater footage of a blue-whale on Imax is supposed to create an awe of nature, not necessarily a fun amusement. Kids move around restlessly wondering when the picture is over, they do not listen to everything that the narrator is saying. But if they are interested in nature, those images will stay with them in some form and they will come back to that interest in future. The most interesting thing is what is going on inside the viewers head, not what's happening on screen.
Funnily enough, Noe used to make most of his money doing sex education adverts for the French government (coincidentally, some of them contained perfectly normal gay characters, while discussing the issue of condoms and disease).
I believe that his background in merging documentary type facts with fictional scenarios for education purposes, combined with his fathers artistic career, have created this idea of cinema in his head. I have found his movies worthwhile and inspiring - I haven't memorised the lines from the films, I don't watch them every month, I didn't sit through them with a stupid big smile on my face as I did watching ToyStory 2, but the experience did stay with me and reminds me not to make assumptions about people or places, to see details of life that other people would rather surpress, and to be honest about my own instincts, even if I may not be proud of some of them.
Also, I'm sick of hearing people talk about how they can't 'connect' or 'identify' or feel for another charcter if their life has not somehow been explained or justified to the audience. They are human beings! -what more justification does another human need to care about whether they die or not?!
"I don't know whether that man I see floating on a raft in the Pakistan flood is anything like me or not... ah well.... screw him, I hope he drowns... he's done nothing to endear himself to me... he may as well be a manequin for all I care.... I'm just not engaged in his story"
-that is the truely juvenile view of the world.
I'm kind of amazed too that from all the visuals and directing etc that Noe has to offer, all that people here (and very honstly, it's the only place I know where it's the case) seems only to have seen the fact that some bad guys here and there are homosexual.
Which would lead to a question : ask yourself : if they weren't, what would you say about Enter The Void, or Irreversible ?
In France, I insist, almost no one said anything about it.
I don't know if it's cultural or something like this, and I don't to look as some devil's advocate, but still.
My problem isn't that he portrays homosexual characters as bad or anything, I don't think there are any such characters in the one film of his I have seen. My issue from a story perspective is the overt childishness of it all. The rather naive nihilism in his VO for example quickly turns from humourous in it's overwrought way to just annoying. Honestly that is the film's biggest problem. It tries so hard to be dour and cool that it induces all of the wrong emotions. Even von Trier recognizes the power of humour. That experience gave me the distinct impression that Noe is just a whiny little kid that has listened to and misunderstood too many Cure songs. As for him as a visualist, and he may have improved since, but there's nothing terribly spectacular to his compositions. It's just a bland grayness that balances the exciting and the mundane in the most obvious of fashions. I Stand Alone, at least, is basically worthless. (though I'll give this one a shot to see if he is also worthless)
Last edited by knives on Tue Sep 14, 2010 9:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Yeah, sorry to burst your bubble, but homophobia is the least of Noe's (and Enter the Void's) problems, in my opinion. It's more symptom than cause. Maybe if you went back and read this thread you'd get a better idea of what the issues under consideration are.
Trash nothing but trash
Trash. And trash people and trash culture and trash minds
Sorry, but such a philippica is not very helpful or fruitful without backing it up with some arguments (but isn't that a characteristic of a tantrum)?
And, yes, I want it too for Christmas. :-&
david hare wrote:Can someobody here just take Noe (and his supporters) aside and shove something up their collective asses?
I thought rosko's post deserved something for - not originality - but sheer blind identification with the subject. Truly I admire this, if only in some sort of (non-NOe-ian) perverse way, but not up my own ass which has accomodated far better things than a tapeworm, but I pause meaningfully when the posters here dont even mention the shat upon women in Noe's films. But I guess that really would give the game away for the children....
The spectacle of Bellucci's face being bashed in - during one of the stupidest pictures ever made - somehow always gives rise in me to some infinite sense of detachment and calm.
Trash nothing but trash
Trash. And trash people and trash culture and trash minds.
I'm not sure why we find it unacceptable for newbies to post something like this, but okay for long-time posters. I've enjoyed your posts in the past David, but this rather crosses the line. Firstly, you attack the directors' supporters (and there are a lot of them), then you state your own opinion without offering an actual defense for it. Finally, I'm not sure why you can't at least imagine someone taking an aesthetic liking towards Noé's enchanting visual style.
James wrote:I'm not sure why we find it unacceptable for newbies to post something like this, but okay for long-time posters.
Because David has a long history of invaluable posts and peerless contributions. Though such a rant is still not entirely appropriate, we're more inclined to begrudgingly allow it from people like him than we are from newbies of whom rants seem to be all they are capable.
James wrote:I'm not sure why we find it unacceptable for newbies to post something like this, but okay for long-time posters.
Because David has a long history of invaluable posts and peerless contributions. Though such a rant is still not entirely appropriate, we're more inclined to begrudgingly allow it from people like him than we are from newbies of whom rants seem to be all they are capable.
In other words, he's earned it (and I say that as someone who doesn't entirely agree with his point of view).
I hope it's the uncut.
