Entering the Void

The fact is we are all given a death sentence. Once you're born you begin to die. But let’s say you get some very bad news, as some people do, and you’re told that you just have six months to live. You’re life is now finite. Something like this was what happened to the neurologist Oliver Sacks when he was informed that he was dying. Sacks had always been enormously productive in his work as a doctor and writer, the latter feeding off the former, but as odd as it sounds the news he received only motivated him more in both his work and his life. In an Op-Ed piece (“My Own Life,” NYT,  2/19/15), he quoted David Hume in describing his state of mind, “I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution. I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment’s abatement of my spirits. I possess the same ardour as ever in study and the same gaiety in company.” Some might take a different approach when given such a prognosis. They might slip into melancholy and self-pity or decide that since their days were numbered, they were simply going to gratify all their senses and do whatever they want. The might argue that they have spent their whole life working, being a parent or attending to their own parents in their years of convalescence and now it’s there time, meaning a license for self-indulgence. Sounds a little like the prisoner on death row, allowed whatever he wants for his last supper, no? This is precisely the plot of Kurosawa’s Ikiru which translates as “to live.” The central character, a civil servant named Watanabe, learns that he is going to die. At first he indulges in a Walpurgisnacht with a Mephisto like cohort, but the pleasures of wine, women and song pale against the void he's facing (Enter the Void is by the way the title of Gaspar Noe’s film about death which, like Ikiru, also has scene of Tokyo nightlife) and he finally finds solace in the notion of helping others and in particular by building a park for children. The last scene of the movie depicts him on one of the swings in the park he has built singing softly to himself and it’s one of the most touching and indelible images in the history of cinema.

Gaspar Noe’s Love

At one point in Gaspar Noe’s Love, his male lead Murphy (Karl Glusman), a would be director studying filmmaking in Paris, announces “my biggest dream is to make a film that depicts sentimental sex.” Audiences who see Love may ask why it isn’t simply called Sex, since the sex is graphic, and so ubiquitous that the brazenness becomes almost routine. During the Q &A the followed one of the opening night screenings of the film Noe remarked “I don’t see why there aren’t more genitals in movies. They’re everywhere.” But make no mistake about it Love is not  porn. Noe whose contribution to civilized society may lie in reintroducing the now almost extinct cosmetic notion of pubic hair into a world intent on Brazilian waxing, tips his hat to Courbet, particularly with respects to the painter’s famed “The Origin of the World,” whose wanton sexuality negotiates a fine line between beauty and provocation. From the first scene of mutual masturbation between Murphy and Electra (Aomi Muyock), the film uses sex to communicate states of emotion and being. A later threesome with a next door neighbor Omi (Klara Kristin) is a set piece. It’s not the climax of a dramatic scene, it's the scene. As in Blue is the Warmest Color, the sex itself tells the story. It’s the language of the film. The problem, in the case of Love, is that  the result creates a kind of schizophrenia that was not apparent in its predecessor, which was a seamless melding of sex and talk. With Love, the sex is more intelligent than any of the words iterated by the characters. Here for instance are a few examples of Murphy’s lines: “I’m just a loser, a dick and a dick has no brains,” “living with a woman is like sleeping with the C.I.A.; nothing is secret,” “I want to make movies that are blood, sperm and tears” “it’s raining, it’s cold and maybe we’re not the great artists we once dreamt we were.” None of this does justice to the complexities of the physicality the director portrays or from his singular view of sex a mixture of pain and babies. And the dialogue has caused some critics to ask how a film that’s shot in 3-D could have such bi-dimensional characters (though commenting on Noe’s use of erotic 3-D one audience member remarked that it was the first time she’d been cummed on by a movie). All this being said, it must be pointed out that Noe carries on the tradition of the European directors he obviously admires. Electra whose appearance recalls the vampish Jeanne (Maria Schneider) of Last Tango  disappears much like Antonioni’s Anna (Lea Massari) in L’avventura. His male lead wears a Fassbinder tee shirt and there’s a Salo poster on the wall of his apartment. And the notion of the outlaw as artist or in this case the artist as outlaw recalls the world of Godard’s Breathless. Noe, who made his reputation as the infant terrible of art house cinema with Irreversible and Enter the Void, has followed in the footsteps of giants while developing a cinematic vocabulary that’s all his own. N.B: If words fail, why not just use movement? Remember  The Joy of Sex? Why not produce a  graphic dance piece called The Pain and Joy of Sex? Such a work would undoubtedly play to sell out crowds.

Enter the Void

Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void pays homage to Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, both in the prominent portrayal of drugs and an iconic toilet scene. Enter the Void is shot in the psychedelic style of films like Terry Giliam’s Brazil, but it has the mythopoeic breadth of Joseph Campbell. Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), the central character, takes a drug called DMT that mimics the feeling created by an enzyme the body shoots into the brain at the time of death. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which describes the moment of death as a replay of life, is cited just as Oscar meets his drug-induced maker, and the book’s prophecy plays out in handheld camera shots jerkily hovering over scenes from Oscar’s past—the gruesome death of his parents in a head-on collision (searingly repeated throughout the film), his sister Linda’s (Paz de la Huerta) abortion (including a graphically depicted fetus), and his witnessing, as a child, the primal scene of his parents fucking in the doggy position. In an anomalous twist, he even observes his own cremation. Oscar’s subjective mind is the doppelganger hanging over the movie, and it presents a curious paradox, since utter subjectivity is invoked to depict the death of the self. Noe’s early Irreversible achieved notoriety due to a graphically violent eight-minute rape sequence. Noe’s camera is equally unflinching in Enter the Void. In what must be a cinematic first, the penis is shown entering the vagina from the point of view of the vulva. However, despite the violence, drug addiction and pornography that constitute the director’s palette, Enter the Void is ultimately a family drama, albeit of a gruesome sort. Their parents’ death is the driving force in both Oscar's and Linda’s lives, and it’s what cements their incestuous bond. Unlike more traditional cinematic excursions into the territory of trauma, Enter the Void suffers from a lack of plot—maybe because of the director’s globally ambitious approach to his subject, which is life itself.