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oh yeah wrote:Like many others, I admired the form (this has been stated in so many different ways it's almost a cliche by now!) but found the content sorely lacking. The feeling I got coming away from it was one of utter emptiness. Now, certain films I do like give off an "empty" or even "hopeless" feeling as well, but this is a unique emptiness in that I feel crushed and depressed without feeling like I've seen anything of worth or interest, just a lot of shock tactics and show-y technique attempting to pound me into submission. A recent first-time viewing of Haneke's The Seventh Continent yielded a similar feeling, yet at least that film shows a little restraint, and is interesting existentially as opposed to Noe's threadbare psychedelic nihlism. (Sorry, I'm probably starting to sound a bit like Armond White here - probably best not to compare two relatively unrelated films...)

I don't equate Noe's emptiness here with anything remotely impactful or meaningful enough to compel a feeling of depression. As with some others I was only bored. Almost from the beginning. Now this is partially due I suppose to a pre-existing disinclination toward Noe (his first film is the only one I can see merit in, though I think that one is great--too bad about all the rest). Still, I can genuinely say I was not troubled or disturbed or anything like that, only irritated that I was spending the time watching this. If I had not been with a friend I'm pretty positive I would have shut it off. I agree Seventh Continent is better and I hate that movie. But, hey, at least I had some measure of a response to what I was watching.

On that note, and because I don't think we have a thread for it and I don't think it needs to have one, I can put in a plug for Buried here as a far better bad trip ultimately nihilist picture. And yet even there I struggled for a long time afterwards with the ending as I just don't know whether going for the downer is necessarily so inherently brave a move anymore or fundamentally more true. Certainly it isn't profound, though that's not really what it's shooting for anyway. But for me I keep thinking that the ending of something like The Game or Miracle Mile is far more disturbing or bracing for the way in which those pictures toy with our notion of what constitutes a happy or sad ending or tone period. Buried's ending is smart and painful but it also feels vaguely lazy; the sort of dark end one would expect now as flip side to the overly sunny version supposedly still perpetrated by the mainstream. It still seems to me after days of thinking about it that a positive seeming ending inflected with some kind of Downhill Racer-esque moment of lingering, troubling self-awareness would have made the whole enterprise seem more worthwhile and left us with something genuinely profound to chew over rather than chewing over whether it mattered that it wasn't.

John Cope wrote:(his first film is the only one I can see merit in, though I think that one is great--too bad about all the rest).

For clarity's sake, do you mean Carne or Seul contre tous?

Yeah, you're right to point that out. I meant Seul contre tous.

zedz wrote:

colinr0380 wrote:I was left thinking that 'The Void' is not death but the emptiness and pointlessness of existence

Isn't this point banged home for the umpteenth time by the final shot: POV birth followed by big "ENTER THE VOID" title (OMG! So deep!)

I agree (though Noe does something even more bluntly obvious and bookends the film between two intertitles "ENTER" at the opening and "THE VOID" at the end as the baby is chucked into the incubator. Also, while it made sense for Irreversible, why does Enter The Void begin with the end credits? Just because it worked well in the previous film and so has become the director's signature flourish?) and for me that was perhaps the biggest disappointment of the film - the hopes that I had that this might actually push Noe into new territory of the afterlife (which has been having a raw deal of it lately with this and the facile Lovely Bones. It is worrying when the mawkish Robin Williams film What Dreams May Come stills stands out as one of the most interesting recent 'afterlife' films - and I even have my issues with that film for the eternal damnation of the wife simply for having committed suicide, even if it does lead to a moving scene) were dashed when the conceit was only used for yet another adolescent 'life is awful' mope piece just shown, as FerdinandGriffon said, from a novel overhead camera angle.

I generally love 'life is cruel and awful' films but with it being impossible to relate to the main character and know what he is really thinking about anything in the film (or if he's thinking at all) there is just no way to connect to the film except as a sequence of cliched events. At the moment I think that I would rank Irreversible over this simply because there you have charismatic actors and the Bangalter score to at least inspire some connection - here there is nothing of substance to connect to and only pretty but repetitive images to distract from that emptiness.

Ironically the one sequence that actually does break the mould is the one that appears to have been edited out of the shorter version - the ghostly Oscar's dream(?) of waking up in the morgue and being reunited with his friend and sister, seemingly fine but unable to talk. Then there follows the sequence in the car with the sister lashing out at him as if he is disfigured (which of course in the first person view we cannot tell) or anger that now she has to take care of him rather than the other way around. Then we move to the French guy dishelleved in the alley telling Oscar that it is impossible he could have survived - doesn't he remember the body being cremated? It isn't an amazing scene (it reminded me of the far better sequence at the end of Last Temptation of Christ about being given the glimpse of a different life), but at least it suggests something about Oscar and Linda's relationship, especially when it is bookended by moving into Linda's head and leaving it as she wakes and tells Mario about the dream she had (which suggests Oscar carrying out a kind of mental rape on his sister, tormenting her with these ideas and influencing her by his ghostly presence).

I can understand why it was removed to shorten the film though - while the rest of the film is punishingly repetitive it basically presents a long string of linear events while this 'dream sequence' is more of an extra ox bow lake of embellishment.

I also agree with zedz that the content ends up damaging the style. Even knowing that Noe always takes an idea and runs way past the interesting initial moment into an often punishingly trite and obvious conclusion (the literally masturbatory short he did for the Destricted compilation is a perfect example of revealing the reasoning behind the work early on into the piece and then monotonously waiting for the next fifteen minutes for the guy onscreen to reach his climax in order for the work to end. Noe might be making an ironic point, but its still a fairly obvious one), the repetition here serves to dilute almost all of the stylistic tricks. This is why I think, if anything is remembered about the film it will be the early drug trip scene, the 'dream sequence' talked about above and perhaps the mini-movie Love Hotel scene, as they do not feel that they have been repeated ad infinitum - though I would question the need to have to go into every room of the Love Hotel rather than just focusing on a couple of the key locations involving characters important to the plot. But then this excess is an intrinsic Noe characteristic - there are interesting ideas or moments there, but you have to wade through so much else, and ignore all the cod philosophising and stumbling attempts at gratuitous offensiveness, to get to the relevant stuff. (Apropos John Cope's comments above I still think Carne is Noe's best work, better even than Seul Contre Tous, and is so powerful simply for being so stripped down therefore not outstaying its welcome).

As an example of the interesting or shocking turned into the mundane, I was particularly annoyed by the blaring car crash involving the parents, repeated twice early on and then flippantly thrown in again as Linda and the French friend on their way to the Love Hotel in the back of a taxi scream to *watch out!* at each other. Presumably this was included at this late stage to act, as the countdown in Seul Contre Tous did, as an alarm clock to startle (or wake up) most of the members of the audience into alertness for the final stretch of the film.

And the way that the camera turns into a fish eye lens just before it does a plunge into a foetus/sink/lamp is sort of amusingly novel the first time around, as if the camera is taking a long run-up before diving in, but gets rather tired by the fourth or fifth time it does the exact same thing. The same with the zooming back and forth across the city to get from scene to scene - although at least with that technique by the end of the film there is an interesting feeling of having explored the geography (or at least every possible entrance and exit point) of every key location thoroughly. There might be an interesting project there for someone to create a map of the city and show the back and forth journey between all of the locations to identify a pattern!

colinr0380 wrote:an interesting feeling of having explored the geography (or at least every possible entrance and exit point) of every key location . . .

And character!

I don't know, if I was a bodiless spirit that could go anywhere I don't think I'd stick around and watch my sister get banged. You could go anywhere. Go underwater or shoot off to Jupiter or even under the ice of Europa to see if anything is actually living there. Sounds like Karl Pilkington but it makes sense to me.

oldsheperd wrote:I don't know, if I was a bodiless spirit that could go anywhere I don't think I'd stick around and watch my sister get banged.

Yes, but it makes sense if we are to think that the bodiless spirit in question maintains the idiot identity of the one from whom it emerged.

As to Colin's comment, full confession demands that I acknowledge I have not seen Carne. However, if it is a boiled down version of Seul Contre Tous than it probably is Noe's best. Then again, his moronic We All Fuck Alone short from Destricted might put the kabbash on assuming shorter form is better for him. More potent, yes, but not necessarily better. Then again, perhaps his music video work is best of all worlds.

You're right there, Cope. Brown's character proved you can be a dumbass spirit when:

Spoiler

He decided he'd like to be the son of a Drug Addict and Stripper

The Destricted short dashed my hopes that he might work better on a short film canvas as Noé seemed to have just taken all the bad habits of the longer works and applied them there in an even more aggressive manner - though I thought the earlier short film (which I think was part of that series of Canal+ films using hardcore imagery to promote condom usage) Sodomites was a much better, and surprisingly amusing in the light of what was to follow, film as a lady valiantly takes on a randy minotaur in front of a crowd of well-to-do onlookers. I'm afraid that I haven't seen any of Noé's music videos - can you tell us anything about them, John?

I think that I prefer Carne over Seul contre tous mostly for the absence of the shock ending that has characterised all of the features (if you count the opening of Irreversible in that). It has been a while since I last saw it, but Carne also has that third person narration that helps to ground the narrative somewhat and detach us from the main character, which I found actually helped to then make Seul contre tous more effective as you suddenly get the stream of consciousness first person voiceover ranting bursting through and given full licence to overwhelm everything else. (Didn't Seul contre tous also open with the third person narration giving a condensed run through of the events of Carne playing over still images?)

I guess we could think of Seul contre tous and Enter The Void as polar opposites - one with non-stop narration and the other with none at all (or rather very little narration. It is all packed into the pre-death half hour of the film and, along with all of the various 'motivations' that drive Oscar over the next two hours that are also squeezed into this section, consists of superficial mundanities of the "I'm not a junkie" ilk), using the respective overwhelming presence or utter absence of such to conceal a simple narrative thread, whilst Carne and Irreversible are more detached, third person oriented versions of their partner films.

The most famous of Noe's music videos would probably still be the one he did for Placebo. I like it a lot, especially for its Bret Easton Ellis style moralism. As far as I'm concerned it's a hell of a lot more effective and worthwhile a piece than the way overextended, similarly pitched Love Hotel stuff from EtV. There's also his videos for Bone Fiction and Arielle.

As I think about this now (and frankly I'm doing more of that than I really want to) the reason the issue oldsheperd brings up is an issue to me at all has to do with Noe's overall emphasis. It prompts an ultimately rather useless speculation on our part. Because as I reflect on the end of EtV I can only think that he's trying to suggest that the love of these siblings overcomes everything else, trumps the noxious environment surrounding them and contextualizing them, the one I for one can't get past. If we were then to wonder why we need to be exposed to so much of that environment one could assume he might argue that the power of their implicit love is enough to make up for any seeming presentational imbalance; that, in fact, the excess it overcomes is the whole point, hence the necessity of the imbalance. And, of course, we get the requisite establishing orphan narrative in order to further bulwark that position. In other words, this is a sad state of affairs, isn't it?

But I just don't buy that. Even if I were to believe that Noe shared my monumental boredom with the transgressive lives he documents here it still wouldn't justify such a flat and prolonged presentation. Academically, I suppose, he could justify even that by pointing out the Zen space aesthetic he's supposedly shooting for. In which case I'll simply have to fold and acknowledge that the end result ain't worth the effort. But that puts me in the awkward position of seeming to say that I can't buy love overcoming filth. Let's just forget the fact, I guess, that this bromide is hackneyed and simplistic to be charitable.

But, in truth, I think it's mostly all just a pretext to indulge Noe's particular set of fetishes (I have a bit of a bias here too as I've been working on and off for the last several years with a filmmaker who's own set of fetishes seems to predictably emerge and take over almost every project). I wouldn't care about any of this if it weren't for the fact that by presenting this as he does, with so many built in justifications to ensure its standing as profound art piece, he throws a kind of assumed deficiency of character or spirit back upon those of us who see little of either in the work itself.

colinr0380 wrote:(Didn't Seul contre tous also open with the third person narration giving a condensed run through of the events of Carne playing over still images?)

Yes - after the opening in the bar we get the rapid-fire rundown of the butcher's life, which includes a pretty detailed précis of Carne.

It's probably worth mentioning that the 40-minute Carne is more of a mini-feature than a short per se - in fact, it would qualify as a feature under at least one definition, since it's longer than three reels/33 mins. It's included in at least two French DVD editions of Noe's work - without subtitles, but I managed to find a .srt set online that matched up perfectly.

John Cope wrote:As I think about this now (and frankly I'm doing more of that than I really want to) the reason the issue oldsheperd brings up is an issue to me at all has to do with Noe's overall emphasis. It prompts an ultimately rather useless speculation on our part. Because as I reflect on the end of EtV I can only think that he's trying to suggest that the love of these siblings overcomes everything else, trumps the noxious environment surrounding them and contextualizing them, the one I for one can't get past. If we were then to wonder why we need to be exposed to so much of that environment one could assume he might argue that the power of their implicit love is enough to make up for any seeming presentational imbalance; that, in fact, the excess it overcomes is the whole point, hence the necessity of the imbalance. And, of course, we get the requisite establishing orphan narrative in order to further bulwark that position. In other words, this is a sad state of affairs, isn't it?

The problem I have with the film is that the city looks fantastic and a very exciting place to be in! (Though to a British viewer the opening walk through the city may feel strangely similar to a certain Channel 4 ident!) Even the strip clubs and back alleys are aesthetically beautiful (as in a way, though it might be crass to ignore the action that unfolds in that location to comment on the set, was the central tunnel in Irreversible. I particularly remember the music video for Irreversible which used Bangalter's Stress theme whilst the camera roamed up and down that tunnel). You could almost suggest that the city is reflecting the psychology of the characters, if there were any discernible psychology displayed by them in the first place to be reflected.

Which I think reflects badly on our cast of characters - as with many of the characters in the previous films they're really more responsible for causing and then diving further into their downward spirals themselves rather than having been driven that way by outside factors (with the rape in Irreversible perhaps being the one exception), and mostly they're already irretrievably damned at the point at which we encounter them (with the hard-won, tenuous, maybe-salvation of the butcher and his daughter at the end of Seul contre tous being a stand out exception).

I don't really feel anything for the brother and sister here, or the French friend, or Victor, or Mario - they all make really stupid decisions and pay for them but without ever seeming to grow or learn anything from their experiences. They just go back to repeating the same cycle all over again. Maybe that's Noe's point, but its a depressingly futile one which seems itself undermined when combined with all the adolescent philosophising about the Book of the Dead, the cliched Kodak moments, etc.

I don't think Noe is condeming the world around them for 'forcing' them into their predicaments (Oscar is just dealing drugs because having a 'real job' is "slavery" - just one of the many superficial insights we are thrown in the scene leading up to Oscar's death. Linda's annoyance at his slacking is also undermined by her 'real job' being stripping). At the same time any small connection with the characters is lost by those moments where it feels as if Noe breaks the fourth wall and cracks an incredulous smile at the way the audience are actually trying to empathise with these characters on screen (as with the Destricted short, I got the impression that about halfway to three quarters through the film Noe is just as amazed as the rest of us that anyone is going to have put up with the film for this long and just seems to be baiting the remaining viewers into leaving. Though the chance to continue experiencing BUF's visual effects showreel is just enough to keep going until the bitter end)

But that puts me in the awkward position of seeming to say that I can't buy love overcoming filth.

That is where I found the essential futility of the film to lie. To make that kind of argument of 'love overcoming filth' you need a powerfully argued, or at least compelling, narrative. If the characters aren't up to the task of satisfyingly fulfilling that kind of role in the narrative then that is the fault of the film for not developing them, or backing them up. Which leads me to consider that the film is actively undermining them, or at least not making them sympathetic or easily relatable to in any way (they just feel like blank slates to me, except sometimes they have to 'act' angry or upset), something which left me thinking that there was more of a possessive neediness than 'true love' between the characters - a fear of being alone that transcends death, with the irony being that even when you are able to perform the ultimate act of being reborn through your sibling you still end up a completely separate being from them, unable to ever make contact (I assume that this baby is going to have serious mother-fixation issues when he grows up!)

This also I think relates to the way that film is also seeming to be undermining its special effects, such as the many 'moving towards the light' moments (or the presumably revelatory plunges into orificies) which move past the moment of impact and get drawn out into irrelevancy and redundancy. Add this to the way that I think the film is structured seemingly to make the audience remember that a certain scene took place in a certain location at a certain time but which seems to be jumbled up in the film in order to prevent the audience from easily being able to identify at which point a particular moment or scene occurred in the course of the film itself, and there seems to be the suggestion of the film being created around 'significant' but fleeting moments that have stuck in the character's mind, whether they led to any important action or revelation or (more often) did not.

Anyone seen the Kanye video that had to put a warning saying it may cause seizures in front of it? I heard about this last week and thought to myself "it can't be any worse than the credit sequence to Enter the Void" - turns out it's just a blatant rip off of it! Has he ever actually done anything original?

Ummm... his music?

I was looking forward to "All of the Lights" being better than Enter the Void, but I agree it is not very good. Runaway was one of my favorite films of 2010 though.

chaddoli wrote:Ummm... his music?

This.

huh. fair enough I guess. not a fan and consider him the single most over-rated musician in history. but I don't want to derail this thread and should probably learn to leave the asides, well, aside. I just thought it was an interesting cultural crossover of sorts - and now that I think about it, is probably more the fault of Hype Williams than Kanye - considering he put his name in the same lights as Gaspar did. Odd.