ENTER THE VOID

GASPAR NOE, 2009

He shocked us all with Irréversible, and Gaspar Noé's latest is a magnificently deranged melodrama, says Peter Bradshaw, guardian.co.uk

It has been eight years now since Gaspar Noé released his notorious rape-revenge film Irréversible, an ultra-violent, ultra-extreme movie that effortlessly exceeded in shock value anything, by anyone, at any time. I myself, having admired his previous feature, Seul Contre Tous, reacted fiercely against it as a piece of macho provocation. Rereading my review now, I find none of its points wrong exactly, but I have to concede the possibility that I was just freaked out in precisely the way Noé intended. Having staggered out of the auditorium, my eyeballs still vibrating from the director's trademark sado-stroboscopic white light display, I may well have succumbed to a convulsion  of disapproval.

Enter the Void is, in its way, just as provocative, just as extreme, just as mad, just as much of an outrageous ordeal: it arrives here slightly re-edited from the version first shown at Cannes. But despite its querulous melodrama and crazed Freudian pedantries, it has a human purpose the previous film lacked, and its sheer deranged brilliance is magnificent. This is a grandiose hallucinatory journey into, and out of, hell: drugged, neon-lit and with a fully realised nightmare-porn aesthetic that has to be seen to be believed. Love him or loathe him – and I've done both in my time – Gaspar Noé is one of the very few directors who is actually trying to do something new with the medium, battling at the boundaries of the possible. It has obvious debts, but Enter the Void is utterly original film-making, and Noé is a virtuoso of camera movement.

We get the classic Noé tropes: throbbing ambient soundscape, murky lighting design bursting into unwatchable vortices of dazzling, flickering light, explicit sex and violence, colossal sans-serif lettering for the title- and end-credits. This film, however, has a new motif: what we see is purely the point of view of its leading figure; we watch everything through his eyes. He is a small-time drug-dealer called Oscar (Nathaniel Brown). Irréversible had a horrific club called the Rectum; this one has a bar in Tokyo called the Void, where Oscar is shot by cops. His spirit hovers over the city, an unquiet ghost unable or unwilling to leave, watching over his sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta), a pole-dancer now utterly alone in the world.

This brother and sister have a strange and tragic story, which might in other circumstances have interested authors like Ruth Rendell or PD James: orphaned as kids, they were fostered separately, and on becoming 18, the older child Oscar apparently enters into some modest trust-fund inheritance which enables him to travel to Tokyo – a long-lost childhood longing for exotic travel – and later makes enough through drugs to bring his adored sister over, and live with her in an atmosphere of   incestuous yearning.

He revisits in horrified anguish, primal scenes from his childhood, including the death of his parents in a car wreck, which has seeded in Oscar this obsessive closeness to his sister and a sexualised longing for his lost mother, which finds expression in an affair with an older woman in Tokyo. Through some bizarre karmic influence, Oscar's spirit now sets out to part Linda from her current boyfriend, sinister tough guy Mario (Masato Tanno) and to get her together with his friend Alex (Cyril Roy), an amiable, dishevelled artist and the nearest thing this film has to a normal, sympathetic human being.

Oscar's dead-man floating-eye view gives us a ringside seat at scenes of unending horror, violence, squalor and pain. Yet there is a kind of barking mad spiritual dimension in Noé's film. Enter the Void is about life after death. Specifically, it's about the life after death that troubles all of us atheists and rationalists most of all: the life after death that we all believe in – other people's lives in this busy and unhappy world carrying on heedlessly after we are dead.

The POV-style changes as the film progresses. When Oscar is still alive, we see strictly what he sees, and the view is periodically impeded by his blinks – as the initial scenes continued, I found my own blink-rate coming into synch with Oscar's, and so this became invisible. His thinking mind is represented by a whispered, paranoid soliloquy. After his death, this falls silent and he sees the past partly impeded by the back of his own head.

Then, this disappears as his spirit floats everywhere and anywhere: death as the ultimate out-of-body experience. It's like a psychedelic innerspace version of Kubrick's 2001, and the film even finally presumes to offer a version of the star-child rebirth. Like Kubrick, incidentally, Noé has a fondness for trad classical – he brings Air on a G String on to the soundtrack. As for the overhead visions of violence and claustrophobic horror, they are clearly influenced by the climactic sequence of Scorsese's Taxi Driver.

Noé's most startling achievement in Enter the Void is his vision of Tokyo: he reimagines it as a branching, crystalline network of neon laid out starkly against the night sky. The city is never seen in daytime. It is not real, but has merged with an illusory vision of the neon-model created by an artist friend of Victor's, and it is also an architecturalised version of those spiralling, kaleidoscopic snake-shapes that Oscar sees while tripping.

Some may find Enter the Void detestable and objectionable, though if they affect to find it "boring" I will not believe them. For all its hysterical excess, this beautiful, delirious, shocking film is the one offering us that lightning bolt of terror or inspiration that we hope for at the cinema.

Thursday 23 September 2010

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Enter the Void

Production year: 2009

Countries: France, Rest of the world

Cert (UK): 18

Runtime: 150 mins

Directors: Gaspar Noe

Cast: Cyril Roy, Masato Tanno, Nathaniel Brown, Paz de la Huerta