Gaspar Noé
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Climax works better than most “drug” films because it doesn’t show us what the characters are seeing on LSD but only from the outside: howling and screeching and rolling around like Isabelle Adjani in Andrzej ?u?awski’s Possession.
At one point, Noé virtually restages the demon birth/miscarriage scene from Zulawski’s Possession (another title spotted in that pile of VHS tapes), evoking the mania of Isabelle Adjani in her most memorably freaky performance.
All this is shown on a colour CRT television framed by stacks of books (a mix of philosophy, including Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil , and film theory texts) and VHS tapes— Suspiria (1977) and Possession (1981) stand out as two of the most relevant—which presumably constitute Noé’s personal canon and also serve as pre-emptive annotations of the cinematic assault to come.
Unlike many of Noé’s past efforts, which tend to fall apart the moment a viewer deigns to analyze them beyond an immediate visceral reaction, Climax has more to offer than its all-bangers hard-house soundtrack and a magnificent rendition of Isabelle Adjani’s Possession spasms from Boutella.
The dance school setting may recall Suspiria , but Noe allows a more pronounced homage to Zulawski’s Possession (1981) with an aside featuring Sofia Boutella, a central figure as the troupe leader, as well as the most recognizable cast member out of a diverse crew of international dancers.
And right out of the gate, Noé parallels his desires with that of his characters, asking us to contemplate his own worst nightmare—a world without Possession , without Harakiri , without Suspiria —before then dazzling us with the means by which he staves off that nightmare: his will to create.
A stack of video cassettes is piled next to a TV playing an audition reel for a dance troupe who will eventually be revealed as our cast; the titles on display include Argento’s Suspiria, Polanski’s Possession, Fassbinder’s Querelle and Pasolini’s Salò.
A selection of video tape spines shown next to a television screen that played the preliminary video introductions of each character acts as neat shorthand to introduce the direction that this doomed trip will soon take; references to films like Dario Argento’s Suspiria, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò and Andrzej ?u?awski’s Possession all foreshadow what is to come in one way or another.
Even as Psyche expresses this anxiety about falling under the influence of a film as much as of drugs, her interview, and those of the other dancers, are shown on a television set alongside a pile of videos whose titles – Suspiria, Possession, Hara-Kiri, Querelle, La Maman et la Putain, Un Chien Andalou, Labyrinth Man (i.e. the French title of Eraserhead) – will also cast a dark spell over what follows, dosing the narrative of Climax with their own specific motifs and moods (chiefly free love, writhing hysteria, disorientation and danses macabres, infanticide, suicide and transcendence).
There are VHS copies of Suspiria, Un Chien Andalou, Salò and Harakiri, and books by Nietzsche and on Taxi Driver , Murnau and Fritz Lang.
From here, we flash back to the beginning; a series of taped audition interviews with dancers, played on an old TV (it’s the mid-1990s) alongside which sit VHS tapes of extreme cinema favourites: Argento’s Suspiria , Pasolini’s Salò, Lucio Fulci’s Zombie, Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou – all indications of what is to come.
The murder entails stomach-churning sights and sounds rarely found outside exploitation movies, and the rape hews along the lines of male fantasies like that found in Sam Peckinpah's 1971 career low, "Straw Dogs."
The character sketches, which pit (in largely improvised dialogue) Bellucci's impotent old boyfriend up against Cassel's swaggering, mannish party boy, recall Peckinpah's famously off-putting Straw Dogs in their suggestion that even milquetoasts are capable of mixing love and lust for vengeance to devastating, life-destroying effect.
The couple agreed to make a film with Noe but rejected the proposed sex -- though it quickly became clear that they were willing to participate in simulated violence "even when Noe [affirmed] that he [wanted] to make a film more violent than Salo and Straw Dogs combined.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
influenced Irreversible (2002), Enter the Void (2010), Love (2015)
Visuals
(He also namedrops “2001: A Space Odyssey,” a Noe fave he’s cited on film before.)
This is another trip into the director’s ceaselessly self-explaining universe of archetypes, 2001: A Space Odyssey references, and New Age philosophy, and though Noé ( Enter The Void , Irréversible ) is by turns naïve, juvenile, and clumsily literalist, he is also a filmmaker stubbornly committed to making movies that don’t look or move like anyone else’s.
That this solipsistic young buck should share Noé’s mother’s family name – Murphy – and have the “Love Hotel” model from Enter the Void in his apartment suggests that he is a stand-in for the director, as does his declared devotion to 2001: A Space Odyssey, another trademark trope.
Noé, like Michelangelo Antonioni, Alfred Hitchcock, or Stanley Kubrick (Murphy's favorite film is 2001: A Space Odyssey), uses his actors more as props, synecdoches, or ideas rather than as people who are there to give phenomenal acting performances — although Monica Bellucci (Alex) and Vincent Cassell (Marcus) are ferociously good in much of Irreversible.
Noé twice begins a shot of Bellucci holding a home pregnancy test with the poster for 2001: A Space Odyssey--the one stamped "The Ultimate Trip" on an image of the foetal Starchild, which seems merely associative until it occurs that the final scene in Irr�versible pays homage to 2001's in its nebulous intent.
The poster of 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) that serves as a visual landmark in these scenes is the clue we need.
Writer/director Gaspar Noé has chosen to reverse his chronology nonetheless, with a narrative structure ripped off from Memento .
(Think Memento, only better.)
Working, like "Memento," with 10 ten minute scenes shown backwards (Noe even has fun with his audience by beginning his film with its end credits scrolling backwards) and like Hitchcock's "Rope," in uninterrupted takes cut together against dark backgrounds, Noe proposes that rather than advancing, humankind has regressed to a bestial state.
But like in "Memento", this gimmick serves a purpose.
Like "Memento" (2001), the other recent film told backwards, "Irreversible" features characters behaving tragically because they are unable to know, as we are, what is going to happen next.
Told backward, á la Memento, his story of the story of a vicious sexual assault (of Monica Bellucci's character) begins with her boyfriend's revenge.
Noé had a vision, reportedly sparked by watching Robert Montgomery's Lady in the Lake and Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days on drugs.
The entire film is shot from Oscar’s point-of-view evoking Hollywood classics such as Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake (1947) and the first third of Delmer Daves’s Dark Passage (1947) as well as first person computer games, the opening of Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995) and Jonas Åkerlund’s music video for The Prodigy’s single “Smack My Bitch Up” (1997).
Director Kathryn Bigelow and writer James Cameron took the same idea a decade later and cyberpunked it up as Strange Days (1995), which opened with a truly extraordinary POV action sequence and later cooked up a frightening first-person rape scene.
Pompous with pregnant implications, mean in story, and exhausting rather than exhilarating in technique, the interior and afterlife journey is not a patch on Fantastic Voyage, Yellow Submarine, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Performance , Altered States, Tron, Strange Days and a long et cetera.
The concept of shooting the entire film from the protagonist's point of view is not completely unheard of; in an interview with the Montreal Mirror, Noé has cited the "virtual-reality snuff films" sequences in Kathryn Bigelow's "Strange Days" and Jonas Ã
kerlund's music video for The Prodigy's Smack My Bitch Up as possible influences, to which I'd add Julian Schnabel's "Le Scaphandre et le papillon", about half of which was shown through the main character's POV.
We see the lovers frolicking naked in their gorgeous, brightly lit apartment, in a scene reminiscent of "Eyes Wide Shut", the Kubrick influence confirmed by the "2001" and "The Killing" posters on the walls.
The "joyous" ending of the blissful heterosexual couple (Bellucci and Cassel) enjoying each other's company in the midst of strategically placed posters for Stanley Kubrick pictures (The Killing and 2001) and the heroine discovering that she's pregnant can either be taken as straight or as parodic.
I say ‘we’ because the whole film is shot from Oscar’s point of view (Enter the Void is probably the first full-length film to attempt this schtick since the Marlowe misfire Lady in the Lake in 1947).
Noé had a vision, reportedly sparked by watching Robert Montgomery's Lady in the Lake and Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days on drugs.
The entire film is shot from Oscar’s point-of-view evoking Hollywood classics such as Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake (1947) and the first third of Delmer Daves’s Dark Passage (1947) as well as first person computer games, the opening of Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995) and Jonas Åkerlund’s music video for The Prodigy’s single “Smack My Bitch Up” (1997).
The filmmaker conceived of Enter the Void while tripping out to a screening of Robert Montgomery's 1947 noir Lady in the Lake, in which the entirety of the story is told through the point of view of Montgomery's Phillip Marlowe.
But 1947's The Lady in the Lake, a feature-length film noir shot entirely with a subjective camera, is an oft-discussed but somewhat goofy curio that is seldom actually dragged out into the light of day.
Demonic fits reminiscent of the infamous “rape of Christ” sequence from Ken Russell’s The Devils are viewed from overhead – Busby Berkeley goes to hell.
Choreographed by Nina McNeely, the dancers krump, vogue, and waack in ecstatic abandon, their movements recalling Jennie Livingston’s radical documentary of New York’s “house” and ball culture Paris Is Burning (1990), a queer touchstone whose impact has since filtered into the larger culture.
Fosse might otherwise be a curious point of reference for a Gaspar Noé film, but in Climax, All That Jazz is a difficult point of reference to avoid, particularly as the film moves forward and drug use takes over as a primary ‘plot’ point.
Even as Psyche expresses this anxiety about falling under the influence of a film as much as of drugs, her interview, and those of the other dancers, are shown on a television set alongside a pile of videos whose titles – Suspiria, Possession, Hara-Kiri, Querelle, La Maman et la Putain, Un Chien Andalou, Labyrinth Man (i.e. the French title of Eraserhead) – will also cast a dark spell over what follows, dosing the narrative of Climax with their own specific motifs and moods (chiefly free love, writhing hysteria, disorientation and danses macabres, infanticide, suicide and transcendence).
There are VHS copies of Suspiria, Un Chien Andalou, Salò and Harakiri, and books by Nietzsche and on Taxi Driver , Murnau and Fritz Lang.
From here, we flash back to the beginning; a series of taped audition interviews with dancers, played on an old TV (it’s the mid-1990s) alongside which sit VHS tapes of extreme cinema favourites: Argento’s Suspiria , Pasolini’s Salò, Lucio Fulci’s Zombie, Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou – all indications of what is to come.
Arenas of light, space, neon color and pulsating, writhing movement intersect with a Bosch-like abyss of unrelenting, escalating dread—not unlike the implacable provocations of Darren Aronofsky’s recent mother!
Tensions racial and sexual combust in a hectic grand finale that makes mother!
Spiraling his camera upside down, through the narrow passageways of his single setting, and around elaborately choreographed confrontations between these writhing and possessed characters ( Mother! comparisons have been made, and they’re not off base), Noé redeems and justifies his sensation-junkie insistence on stretching every scene into an endless, slow-motion death dance.
The madness escalates in such a way that comparisons to the final third of Darren Aronofsky‘s “mother!” are inevitable, but that film had thematic ambitions to match its filmmaking chops, and the same cannot be claimed for Noé.
But here, as in fellow self-styled provocateur Darren Aronofsky’s mother!
Chaos, of course, will reign in Noé’s film, which takes place in a kind of purgatorial space not unlike the one at the center of Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel , where a privileged group is unable—or, more likely, unwilling—to leave a drawing room that comes to reflect a world’s ills.
From here, we flash back to the beginning; a series of taped audition interviews with dancers, played on an old TV (it’s the mid-1990s) alongside which sit VHS tapes of extreme cinema favourites: Argento’s Suspiria , Pasolini’s Salò, Lucio Fulci’s Zombie, Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou – all indications of what is to come.
In his role as his sister's guardian angel (à la Wings of Desire and Les Enfants Terribles), Oscar revisits scenes from their childhood — it's complicated and troubled — as well as from her stressful adult life.
Citing Yann Demange’s underrated Belfast thriller ’71 as an immersive inspiration (alongside Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible ) , Patterson litters this increasingly dizzying mystery with playful nods to classic sci-fi chillers like Don Siegel’s 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers .
Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
influenced Irreversible (2002), Enter the Void (2010), Love (2015)
Visuals Themes
We see the lovers frolicking naked in their gorgeous, brightly lit apartment, in a scene reminiscent of "Eyes Wide Shut", the Kubrick influence confirmed by the "2001" and "The Killing" posters on the walls.
(Noé himself referred to Irreversible as his Eyes Wide Shut [Stanley Kubrick, 1999], likewise notorious for its scenes of orgiastic excess (2) .)
Noé wanted, Cassel has said, to make the film that "Tom and Nicole screwed up" -- in other words, to make a more explicit "Eyes Wide Shut."
For all its menace, for all its apparently scandalous cruelty, Noé's film (much like Eyes Wide Shut, his self-declared inspiration) is primarily an indictment of narrative conventions and belief systems.
Though it’s not clear where in their relationship these boundary-challenging encounters occur, Murphy finds himself exploring a Paris swingers club (somewhere between “Eyes Wide Shut” orgy and a Francis Bacon painting) and a second threesome, this time with a transsexual prostitute — both lighter versions of encounters that came drenched in homophobia in “Irreversible.”
Sólo baste ver dos ejemplos de películas que ya han tratado el tema sin tanto escándalo y cursilería: la genial Bitter Moon de Roman Polanski (1992) y aquella obra maestra final de Stanley Kubrick llamada Eyes Wide Shut (el “we need to fuck” del final).
Temporal experiments like Russian Ark and the video game gimmick of Hardcore Henry come to mind, but Nickel Boys is most like the films of Gaspar Noé in this regard, especially his spiritual, out-of-body POV experience Enter the Void, albeit in a much more grounded manner.
Yet to single out Murphy as the film-maker’s alter ego is to miss the point that everyone in Love can be read as fragmented versions of the director; from the young child named Gaspar whom Murphy cradles like Joe Dallesandro in Flesh (Warhol winks are everywhere, not least in a prominently displayed Frankenstein 3D poster) to the art gallery owner played by Noé himself in a fright wig, and of whom Murphy becomes insanely jealous.