Wow, um...that was certainly a Gaspar Noé film alright. I don't think I've been as fundamentally creeped out and left so utterly depressed at the state of the world by a film for a long time as I was by Enter The Void. Irreversible and Seul Contre Tous troubled me a lot but this one just left me with a sense of pointless futility. The adolescent point of view of the world is bizzarely the thing that makes the film easier to watch (and sometimes to be amused by in its crass, blunderingly obvious way of pushing its 'metaphors' into the audience's face over and over again), and yet more despairing and creepier in the idea that the life of an (albeit fictional) character can be reduced to such emptiness while still pretending to carry some sort of profoundity or insight into 'The Human Condition'.
I can admire the attempt to sum up a life which tackling a 'life flashing before your eyes' subject necessitates, but there is always that problem that in attempting to cover the span of a lifetime that supposedly significant events are coarsened into a few cliched moments (picnics on the grass with loved ones; laughing and spinning around in your true love's arms on a beautiful summer day; playing on the beach; running around through the garden of your family home as a child; enjoying a themepark ride or two, etc). Enter The Void never avoids these cliches, and without even the excuse of brevity necessitating such shorthand imagery instead jumps wholeheartedly into almost every one of these 'Kodak moments' and wallows around in them for all they're worth. This happens in the immediate post-death section of the film as we run through Oscar's entire life for the next hour.
One of the things that I find depressing about the film, though I'm not sure if it was intended to be so, is that in running through this section encapsulating the main character's entire life, it also reveals just how shallow and empty Oscar's life actually was. Whether this is just a fault of the film dealing with youthful characters with limited (and childish projections onto) life experiences, or whether it is a coarsening necessitated by having to be able to deal with an entire life in a relatively short amount of time, it feels as if by encapsulating the character in total it makes Oscar less of an interesting and pitiable figure.
It seems that Oscar simply lost his parents in a tragic accident, moved to Japan, got involved with drugs, brought his nubile child-woman sister over with his drug money, got jealous of her and then stupidly thought that he would meet his old drug client after sleeping with his mother (and knowing that Victor himself knew about their liaisons, and subtly showed he was not particularly happy about it by breaking a bottle over Oscar's head) without realising he was likely to be handed over to the police. I don't think we are talking about the tragic loss of a character who had great potential here! However I certainly don't think that all characters need to be worthy to be worth empathy. But there needs to be a little more meat on the character to inspire a connection than just a detailed investigation into his monotonous drug rounds and a creepy incest/possession thing going on with his sister (even the Scarface remake, which boils down to the same two things, had a compelling central performance and an interesting take on the emptiness of capitalist aspirations). Irreversible works better (and is more troubling for that reason) due to the charismatic performances by Bellucci and Cassel who help to power over the lack of characterisation with their personas. Seul Contre Tous had that amazing performance by Philippe Nahon as an absolutely repulsive, yet also pitiable and in some disturbing way relatable in his ranting xenophobic, misogynistic, nihilistic, character. Enter The Void has almost nothing in the way of relatable, charismatic characters.
In that sense it reminds me of a video game in the way that the moment-to-moment experiential is privileged over any actual relatable characters who develop over the course of the film. It seems that you're not meant to sit back and have your own reaction to events occurring between the characters on the screen but you are instead meant to
become the character, which is something that strangely results in a far more reductive experience. This is something which works to some extent in video games where you at least have some measure of control over what your avatar does (albeit very limited and constrained to a linear narrative, even in most 'open world' games), and therefore can feel validated to some extent in placing your emotions onto the actions. But in Enter The Void it is impossible to know what Oscar is thinking about what he is experiencing, which makes it impossible to empathise with him. The character can have no effect on the action, and has no particular goal to fulfil - something which which contributes the essential feeling of futility to the film.
I was left thinking that 'The Void' is not death but the emptiness and pointlessness of existence - each person fundamentally alone with nothing to do but fuck and get high, prostitute yourself and wait for the pain of losing those close to you until you disappear without a trace yourself.
This idea is complicated/made laugh out loud funny(/incredibly creepy) in the film by the incest stuff between Oscar and Linda (which makes Cocteau's Les enfants terribles seem casual and understated! I wonder if it was an influence?), which got a little obvious in the idea that the first thing Oscar does following his death is to zoom over to Linda and jump inside the body of the guy she is screwing - to get a vicarious ghostly thrill? Does it still count as incest if you are doing it post-death? (This actually reminds me of a short film from the late 80s called
The Afterlife of Grandpa in which an elderly ghostly gentleman appears to his grandson, who is excitedly preparing to lose his virginity to his girlfriend that night, and variously begs/cajoles/threatens/guilts him into giving up his virginity so his grandpa can possess his body and have one last thrillride before he goes off into the next world. It was meant to be a lighthearted comedy but the theme was incredibly creepy and icky there too). There was also that slightly comic moment when I had the worrying feeling that Oscar's soul was going to enter, and be reincarnated as, the stripper pole in the club that Linda regularly entwines herself around.
It then reaches gobsmacking proportions in the final Love Hotel sequence when it becomes clear that Oscar has been seeing his sister and his best friend as his potential new mother and father, which suggests that he really needed a wider circle of acquaintances to draw mother and father figures from! It also suggests a nasty strain of xenophobia in the way that, after saying that if the Japanese club boss Mario who Linda is seeing throughout the film gets her pregnant he will kill the baby, we see him enter Mario presumably at the point at which the baby was conceived, follow Linda having the abortion and leaving Mario, and then shacking up immediately with Oscar's white, French best friend (the chap who introduced both Oscar and Linda to drugs and had been wandering the streets since Oscar's death eating from the rubbish, so who was
obviously better father material!), whose baby she then goes on to have (If I were Oscar, following all those events, and being aware of the previous abortion, I would have hesitated at least momentarily before jumping into Linda's womb to take the place of the previous foetus! What if Linda changed her mind again and didn't want the next baby either? C'est la vie, I suppose)
I was left with the inherent horror of the film as not being death but being reborn again as a new, hopeful being. Very anti-Buddhist in that sense! Though I suppose it makes sense that instead of 'moving on to a higher plane of existence' that Oscar gets (willingly) trapped in the reincarnation cycle. It seems basically about the lengths a person will go to in order to have the brief chance to suck on breasts guilt free again, and if that person is your sister or your mother or (to paraphrase Chinatown) your sister/mother, then that is all for the better! With that sense of happiness immediately severed by the cutting of the umbilical cord and getting shoved into a plastic container! Serves Oscar right, is all I can say!
Despite being less than impressed with the actual content of the film, the style of it is often amazing, though swo's point is well taken about the number of orifices or holes in the film that the camera goes through which, though initially amusing, gets rather repetitive and samey after a while. The third section of the film, which follows Oscar presumably watching the events that occur following his death is just a whole string of short scenes punctuated by plunging over and over into light fittings or down drains, which gets quite wearing after a while, and often I couldn't concentrate (and felt the film itself wasn't concentrating either) on the scene at hand but was more fixated on finding the next object it was going to plunge into, which seemed to be missing the point of the scene (stylistics over concentrating on the actual dramatic content of the scene at hand). Though I did like the idea that we were seeing all of the dirt and grime, the traintracks and roads, the frameworks of buildings and tiny alleys getting delineated as we zoomed to one location and back again - sort of the backstage area normally hidden behind the guady, ostentatious facades.
I thought the first half of the film was the best, though this might be because I was still relatively alert and had not yet been bludgeoned over and over by facile points made in a heavy handed manner (an obvious characteristic of a Noé film at this point) and liked the shift from the first person experiential sequence filmed Irreversible-style in a manner to suggest one continuous take into the post-death behind-the-head point of view for the 'life flashing before Oscar's eyes' sequence. This allowed Noé to be able to use editing again to depict Oscar's slipping between fractured memories and making rather too literal and obvious connections between subjects. It also thrusts Oscar from being the character we are living through to himself being placed in the same position as the audience in watching his past life at a remove - this is something I wish that Noé had done more with but unfortunately, due to the charisma void of our main character (presumably to create a kind of everyman figure? Though that would be a troublesome notion in itself, given that he is a kind of dumb, drugged-out protagonist from the small amount we see of him) it is difficult to feel any kind of connection to what he is feeling. Apart from the drug trip early in the film it is very difficult to really understand the main character and what he is feeling about re-watching his past life, what these events actually
mean to him, and whether he actually goes through anything particularly cathartic or enlightening through re-experiencing them. Instead he seems more of a blank - a void at the centre of the film, which is a fundamental flaw for the character being the one we have to connect with, and who has to have actually meant something for the other characters in the film.
I was also struck whilst watching that this has a lot of sequences from Irreversible, just repurposed and on a grander scale. For example the scene immediately post-death where the camera is floating over the aftermath, seeing Victor dragged out screaming and the French best friend running off is similar to Marcus and Pierre being dragged out of the Rectum and into the ambulances at the beginning (end) of that film. Which itself suggests that the Book of the Dead philosophical conversation between Oscar and his French friend on the walk to the club just preceding that moment is equivalent to the opening scene of Irreversible of Philippe Nahon's butcher in the hotel room overlooking the club, himself philosophising about the world. The scene of Linda and Mario in the dressing room of the club having sex followed by her picking up her mobile and learning of Oscar's death seems the equivalent of the Irreversible rape scene - here the sex is not violent but there is that threat hanging over the entire scene that Linda's life is going to totally change once she picks up the phone. The swirling camera scene where Linda is found by a child unconscious on a playground with a handful of pills seems an ironic callback to Bellucci's final 'epitome of womanhood' scene of Irreversible where she seems idyllically happy, and nascently pregnant.
And the Love Hotel scene feels like this film's 'Heavenly' equivalent of Irreversible's 'Hellish' Rectum club - lots of couples copulating in various positions and expelling lots of multi-coloured pheromones around the place. The big changes here are that the Love Hotel comes at the end (I was going to say climax!) of the film while the Rectum opens Irreversible (if only because the narrative was reordered that way); and that the Love Hotel is almost exclusively heterosexual. I say 'almost' because we get the shot of Oscar's betrayer, Victor, down on his knees fellating a couple of Japanese businessmen in the lift, something which combines the homosexual panic and xenophobic fears together into one neat package (it also I suppose fits in with the Love Hotel being a happy place where wrongs are righted, though Victor actually seems quite unfairly put upon throughout the film - one of the more naively innocent characters, with a classical sense of right and wrong, who gets most thoroughly corrupted with almost a De Sadean sense of pleasure by the filmmakers).
One other question I had about this film was whether Noé was referencing Chris Marker in some sequences involving the Japanese friend of the French artist who has built the model city, which comes to psychedelic life in the Love Hotel sequence. I wonder if this was a call back to that scene in Sans Soleil where we are introduced to the guy who was 'reconfiguring reality' by playing it through his computer and adding lots of video effects to it. The narration in Sans Soleil says "he calls it the Zone - a homage to Tarkovsky". Since Noé's production company is Les Cinémas de la Zone, maybe he intended to make his own homage?
So - deeply flawed, incredibly frustrating, often emptily pretentious, dazzingly beautiful and painfully audacious. Quintessential Gaspar Noé. I'd just like better characters (or less superficial characterisation, or if not that then at least a shorter film) next time!