Gaspar Noe is a righteously sick and twisted visionary. I just watched Enter the Void streaming on Netflix. I mean, good sweet goodness. This movie is 2 hours and 41 minutes of shear freedom of insanity. Irreversible, a previous film of Noe, included an uncut 9 minutes back alley rape sequence. Enter the Void surpassed this milestone by a long shot, including some of the most graphic violent and sexual content ever caught on film. Yes, it was the unrated director's cut, but that's all the more the full story that Noe needed to portray.
This film is so intensely colorful, so trippy and vivid, seemingly unspecific in trajectory and yet very orchestrated all at once. You really need to keep up with the action, the camerawork is very gyroscopic and unforgiving. The entire film is shot masterfully from the point of view of the protagonist, a twentysomething American drug dealer in Tokyo named Oscar. After his friend rats him out to the cops, he tries to flush drugs down the toilet in the bathroom while the police are banging down the door. He stupidly yells to them that he has a gun and will use it, and suddenly find himself shot through the chest, proceeding then to die on the floor...slowly.
Then the movie just goes. It's such a disconcerting POV to begin with, the camera literally jerking around and capturing the imagery as a human being would. We even get blackness that is the flashes of Oscar's blinks. As he lays dying on the bathroom floor, his vision gets blurrier and we hear his heart and breath shorten and become faint. He sees police looking at him and moving about, and it's so drawn out that it becomes painful to watch. Noe doesn't skirt the reality of trying to describe what we will never be told, because we'd be dead or dying. Humans always contemplate the 'what if's' and Noe does a scarily good job of capturing the 'answers' on film.
The film open with a fast paced flourish of the credits. Epileptics should not see this movie, as the director employed strobes and disco lights throughout its entirety, and the credits are set to raging club music and a plethora of excruciating fast moving lighting. This film is long, and its intended run-time was truncated by most American distributors. The scenes are so real and graphic, and Noe makes it worse by almost never cutting away. He makes your stomach churn by forcing you to watch.
Oscar floats above Tokyo as a spirit after he is shot, much like the teachings of the book he was reading before he died, The Tibetan Book of the Dead. But before he was shot, he took DMT, a super strong psychedelic drug (in a very visually stimulating sequence), so the audience isn't certain whether he is having some drug induced dream before death, or if this is what could happen after we die. All of this leads up to Oscar's spirit rising above his watching, reliving his past and present simultaneously, then trying to be reincarnated. The camera's visual effects are so stunningly original, and the camera goes places it has never gone before, for instance, into the vaginal canal while being penetrated during intercourse, after which Oscar's spirit is captured in the sperm of his friend having sex with his sister, so he is born to her and therefore stays with her forever as he promised. Yes. You see it all. Great CGI, just stunningly appallingly realistic and graphic, transcending pornography to truth in art form.
Paz de la Huerta plays Linda, Oscar's sister, who is infatuated with her brother. Paz is a sultry bombshell, but she's so strange looking in her beauty, and her willingness to perform multiple sex acts in one singular film seemed to be what Noe intended for the main actress, so she's perfect. The plot and themes are so poignantly told throughout the story of these broken souls, and encompasses many questions human beings infer from life. All the actors are so real and so wrought from incredibly sad life circumstances and poor life choices. The film delivers story, imagery, and psychedelics without having taken (hard) drugs, and shows the downward spiral of these fractured lives from the first person of a spirit. Is it caught in a loop of terror throughout all eternity? Are the choices we make in life set in stone forever, or do we get a second chance? I was convinced that this is how life is lived, and relived. It seems totally tangible and potentially true.
See Enter the Void. Be patient with it, it's very long, and at times, incredibly difficult to watch. Some of the scenes seem masturbatory in their depictions of uncut and disturbing imagery, but this is Noe. This is his world/life view. He's experimented with crazy drugs all around the world, and can reproduce these images flawlessly. His team of film makers are gifted, and skewed at the same time. This film is cracked, its nuts, its beautiful, terrifying, and most of the world, particularly Americans, aren't ready for it yet.
