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January 27, 2010
Enter The Void (2010)
I have yet to see Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Lovely Bones - my opinion of the novel, compounded by the torpor of special effects so pronounced in the trailer, has not sent my scurrying to the theater - but I couldn't help but think of it while watching Gaspar Noe's Enter The Void, and apply it's touchy-feely tagline -'The story of a life...and everything after' - to Noe's vision of just that. Enter The Void, to be fair, is touchy-feely too, in its own inappropriate fashion, and it's perhaps even more dependent on CGI trickery than I presume Jackson's opus is, but it doesn't commit the cardinal sin of realizing the inconceivable. He gives us visions we can relate to - such as a sexual climax filmed from inside a woman's vagina. It's somewhat funny, but also so operatically audacious that it achieves its desired effect in spite of any laughter.
Noe isn't interested in heaven, and death seems to be a means to an end more than a raison d'etre; his intentions, he explained after the screening at Sundance, was to make the audience feel like they were on drugs. He pretty much succeeds. Early in the film, Oscar, the young protagonist, takes a hit of DMT and lapses into an extended reverie of computer generated abstractions - long tendrils of unfurling bioluminescence, swirling flagellum trailing into floral orifices, forever shifting and branching. It's comparable to the final flight in 2001, and also perhaps to a screensaver, but what's remarkable about it is how it captures in visual terms precisely how one's brain functions when under the influence of hallucinogens. In other words, it's not a visual representation of a hallucination (which is only a few degrees less dangerous than representing the afterlife), but a road map, if you will, to how a hallucination works. It's a guide which the rest of the narrative will follow, in a more figurative sense, and during the last 45 minutes, when ennui and distended repetition begin to grate on one's shellshocked eyes and you just want it all to stop - well, you can't take Noe to task for inaccuracy.
You also can't quite take him to task for shallowness, which, to a large extent, Enter The Void is. There's nothing dangerous about the film's provocations. It's unsetting, but not intellectually or ideologically so. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Noe's nihilism, much like David Fincher's, is mostly surface; it's aesthetic window dressing for bravura filmmaking, and indeed, the technical work on display here is of the highest order, graceful and intense and frequently dazzling. There's an enormous amount of digital work on display, but it's nearly impossible to tell where the special effects sequences begin and end. Hence, the film functions as a cohesive whole, a singular experience, and we're able to take a vested interest in the sad lives Noe puts on display. Irreversible worked in a similar fashion - a threadbare story made grandiloquent through craft and conceit. That film, of course, also had two almost unbearably disturbing scenes, which Noe seems to have no interest in topping. Indeed, for all unpleasantness he pushes our noses into here (a violent car accident and its aftermath, an unnervingly realistic abortion), he ultimately reveals himself to be a great big softie.
Posted by David Lowery at January 27, 2010 9:39 PM