Enter the Void
Gasper Noe’s latest film Enter the Void is an example of sheer artistic liberty that a filmmaker/auteur is allowed on the back of one or two notable films. On the back of critical acclaim and notoriety, with increasing artistic autonomy, surplus of funds and a couple of years to think things over, the auteur is allowed to do pretty much whatever they want to do. It’s like letting a small child design their own confectionary factory. They can extend their films length way past the two hour mark, let their script meander into many endless narrative coves and sequences of abstraction, and most importantly, they can be as damm self indulgent as they please. While these film’s ill-disciplined nature and self indulgence are at times overabundant, (aka Apocalypse Now and Charlie Kaufman’s latest film, Synecdoche New York), one cannot help marvel at these long winded works as being some kind of accumulation of the filmmakers cinematic pursuits. Enter the Void is another addition to this list. Apart from a few cuts in length, the film is unchanged since its premiere at Cannes last year, and watching this lengthy, lurid, porn-heavy, psycho-trip into Tokyo’s sleaziest underbelly it is difficult to imagine Gasper Noe thinking to himself that parts needed trimming. In this version, there is a 10 minute sequence of synaesthesia inducing visuals, evoking the effects of a particularly potent party drug. In the film’s final minutes, there is an unflinching and equally lengthy excursion into many rooms of sexual activity in ‘Hotel Love’, a fantasy hotel covered in the brightest of neon. This ambiguous place is where the films end’s its unsteady and dizzying course. Divided into three parts in both aesthetic and narrative, the first part of the film follows Oscar, a young American drug dealer over the course of an hour or so, prior to an encounter with some particularly vicious police in the toilet of a dingy bar named the ‘The Void’. This first part is shot entirely from Oscars eyes, and the audience are given permission to hear his thoughts. The second part of the film shows the course of events leading up to this fatal encounter, and cogently and fleetingly tells Oscars past. It recounts Oscar being orphaned aged 8, his separation from his sister Linda , until the two are finally reunited in Tokyo. This is all told with the camera firmly planted behind Oscar’s head. We watch him being taken away to foster care. It then often cuts to Oscar years later, sauntering around clubs and strip bars in Tokyo. The one continuity of Oscar’s attention is his sister, which manifests itself to be a slightly incestuous longing. These scenes are told briefly that it almost feels like a short film, or a prologue, inside of the film. They are surprisingly tender, even with an air of sentimentality not seen in Noe’s work prior to this. Noe uses Bach’s ‘Air on a G String’, subtlety over these scenes, the piece’s simple beauty supplying the film with a beating heart. This makes the last hour of the film, in all of its detachedness, its alien presence, even more challenging to the viewer. In the last hour, in of the aftermath of Oscar’s fate, Noe’s use of the camera echoes the story Oscar’s friend Alex recounts to him from The Tibetan Book of the Dead, where after death the spirit hovers in a perpetual state of limbo, weightlessly moving above people’s heads before reincarnation. Noe is not a stranger to whirling disorientating camera work which he utilised to nightmarish effect throughout the first 20 minutes of Irreversible, but he has really created a entirely different effect here, unlike anything made previously in cinema. The camera hovers and dives, at one point thousands of feet above Tokyo, to another scene in which the camera gentle focuses on a dead foetus after an abortion (This is the point where four people walked out of the cinema I was in simultaneously). The camera appropriates space in a mystifying and elusive fashion, and rather than give the effect of stomach churning claustrophobia as it did in Irreversible, it evokes a sense of uncanny. It bring to mind what has been remarked about photography by many writers, particularly by Roland Barthes who remarked in Camera Lucida that part of the feeling of uncaniness in regards to photography is felt because of the camera itself not being a human entity, but rather a machine, an apparatus, “the instant the shutter is released; the image separates itself irrevocably from those simultaneous thoughts to assume as separable unthinking existence.” While this remark is made about explicitly photography, about the effect of the mechanism inside an analogue camera, I think Noe’s use of cinematography evokes the uncanniness which Barthes is talking about. As the camera hangs above these character perpetually it gives off the feeling that the audience is seeing through an unthinking presence. I think this is far more provocative than the rather clunky metaphysical concerns of death and the afterlife that this film is also concerned with. This film must be viewed at the cinema, rather than a television or a monitor, in order to relish its aesthetic marvels. It has an after effect too. One leaves the cinema in a slightly paranoid, altered state. One has got so used to the point of view camera angles in the film first half, that walking around Soho after the screening of this film felt strangely similar to Oscar’s journey through the streets of Tokyo. Noe has undoubtedly created a self indulgent film, a film that’s obligatory existentialism is slightly unnecessary, and overshadowed by its gloriously ambitious aesthetic pursuits.
