Day 111: Enter The Void

"Do you remember that pact we made? We promised to never leave each other."

Enter the Void is the incredible, and incredibly flawed, new film from Gaspar Noé. For fans of Noé’s previous work, I Stand Alone and Irreversible, the obscene and graphic thematic content of the work will not be surprising. Noé is an utterly uncompromising artist, for better or worse. There is much to love about this film, but also much to cringe at and be befuddled by. 

This is an experimental film to the core, with visual effects recalling Tony Conrad’s The Flicker, camera movements to best Michael Snow’s La Région Centrale, and an overall psychedelic tone reminiscent of the final sequences of space travel in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Noé’s favorite film. Although there are many benchmarks for the look and feel of this film, nothing that has ever claimed to be a narrative film has taken so far, and to such extreme lengths, technically or emotionally, what is done in this film.

Void bursts into life, spewing all its credits at high velocity in its opening minutes. The film proper opens in extreme POV mode, everything being seen through the eyes of our lead character. The screen even goes black when the character blinks. Oscar, our main man, is a drug dealer living in Tokyo trying to save up enough money to fly his sister Linda over to live with him. When he gets set up in a club, he winds up being shot to death by the police in a bathroom stall. This is the premise of the movie, not a spoiler.

The whole film is set up in one of the early dialogues between Oscar and his friend about the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The film follows a rough projection from subjective to objective, and finally omniscient. The way the story is physically told becomes as much a part of the narrative thread as the actual dramatic action. After Oscar’s death the film loses its POV style and places Oscar into every scene with his back turned to the camera. Noé has stated that whenever he is in his own dreams, that is how he sees himself. During this sequence the main plot develops through very fragmented and cyclical means, and we come to understand more about our characters. Various melodramatic plot twists and turns occur, which are better suited to being viewed than discussed.

The third part of the film then takes a decidedly more omniscient viewpoint. The camera soars and flies over the streets and citizens checking in on various moments of the people Oscar knew when he was alive. The film takes a severe hit to its pacing in this segment as we follow Oscar’s spirit fly back and forth, and back and forth, and then back and forth again over the streets of Tokyo in what looks like a loop of the same four shots in between every other staged dramatic scene.

The film has nothing if not style, and it is visually arresting. The neon lights, ever present flicker effects, and wild soaring camera can create moments of intense cinematic pleasure. However, the film is very long. The version playing in America is 2 hours and 43 minutes, and that’s with the seventh reel cut out for timing (it is added in other countries, but adds nothing significant to the plot). The film has a singular vision, and is awe inspiring to witness, however it lasts for such a long time that it seems less and less immaculate with each passing what-the-fuck moment.

The final flare out of the film involves a psychedelic orgy of all of the film’s characters arbitrarily paired in every conceivable sex act on screen. It is a jolt to the system, and while it doesn’t make clear rational sense, it packs an emotional punch, especially the final sequences, which imply a life reborn. There are many attacks which could be leveled at this film: by bringing us so close to the characters, we somehow end up more detached, the film delights too much in its graphic depictions of drugs and sex, it is far more concerned with style than substance, the way the story is structured does not benefit the viewer. While all are valid, this is kind of missing the point.

Ultimately, this a film about the glory of filmmaking, about pushing groundbreaking techniques so far that they actually become old hat by the films end. Enter the Void is an enthralling, moving, entertaining, maddening, hysterical, mind numbing, borderline boring, pseduo-philosophical mindfuck trance psychedelic explosion that sprays across the screen. It deserves to be seen, argued about, appreciated, walked out on, and tripped out to for generations to come.