Enter the Void a Brutal, if Lovely, Cinematic Escape
Enter the Void is brilliantly made, hugely challenging motion picture that perplexed, bewildered, fascinated and disgusted me almost in equal measure. As Gaspar Noé’s follow up to his hugely controversial Irreversible, it is a movie that busts apart the medium and shows the filmmaker willing to try anything and everything in order to see his vision realized. In short, this is a guy not interested in maintaining the status quo, and if he puts off as many viewers as he entices I get the feelings that just fine with him.
Nathaniel Brown and Paz de la Huerta in Enter the Void © IFC Films
I’ll admit freely that I’m not sure which camp I’m in on this one. From a purely cinematic perspective, Noé does something extraordinary. Like Robert Montgomery 1947 noir Lady in the Lake or the opening scene of Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days, the whole film is shot from the perspective of the protagonist, in this case an American expatriate living in Japan named Oscar (Nathaniel Brown). But his perspective isn’t typical, and like a hallucinatory dream of death before reincarnation much of the picture floats in and out like an ethereal observer trying to make sense of a past, present and future that’s very much in doubt.
Even at 137-minutes, this psychedelic mind trip is completely mesmerizing. A series of sights, sounds and colors that are as ever-changing as the wind, Noé crafts a visual whirlwind that kept me both continuously off my toes as well as on the edge of my seat awestruck. Technically there has been nothing else like this released in 2010, and as trippy and as free-flowing as Christopher Nolan’s Inception was it was a walk in a very benign walk in a rather sedate park when compared to this.
But what does it all mean? Noé and fellow writer Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s (Innocence) script is all over the place, a combination of theological ideas and concepts mixed with drug-induced psychoses that I frankly didn’t quite understand let alone always enjoy. The basic plot follows Oscar, a smalltime drug dealer, after he’s been shot by the police as his essence or spirit or whatever the heck it is floats around looking back it his life and follows his stripper sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta) as she deals with his apparent death.
Is he dead, though? Or is this all just a long acid trip where he has an out-of-body experience during the height of his high? I don’t know, and even after an ending which features sex, love and rebirth I’m not entirely sure I want to speculate. What I do know is that I had trouble liking Oscar, and for a guy who professes he’ll do anything to keep his sister safe and to always remain with her (their parents were killed in a horrific car accident when both were children) he doesn’t make a lot of choices that could help facilitate that.
Then there’s Linda. Oscar comes up with the cash to bring her to Tokyo to be with him and the first thing this supposedly bright and intelligent young woman decides to do is become a stripper. She moans about her brother’s friends, tells him he’s only a handful of steps away from becoming a dealer, but her own actions do anything but reside on the moral high ground. Being with her wasn’t any easier than being with him, and watching how she reacts to his probable demise didn’t exactly give me the warm and fuzzies.
Not that Noé has ever been fascinated with the warm and fuzzies. He likes shocking audiences, showing them images the likes of which they’ve likely never imagined. He takes his camera into corners and areas that turned my intestines to jelly, and if I ever had the urge to see an abortion intimately first-hand or wondered what a man’s penis looked like from inside the vaginal canal this is the director who would take it upon himself to show such things to me.
So it goes without saying then that Enter the Void isn’t for the faint of heart. But for viewers ready to be challenged on every single level this is the movie that does just that. For all my hesitation and reluctance to embrace it personally I can’t wait to watch it again. A single viewing just doesn’t do a picture like this justice, and for all the harsh unrelenting ugliness there is a vivacious ethereal beauty to the final moments that, maybe, potentially, very likely probably, makes all the difficulty getting there gloriously worthwhile.
Film Rating: êêê (out of 4)
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