Crystal Fairy & The Magical Cactus and 2012

The search for Nirvana had not lost its virginity when it first started to appear in films and novels in the in the 50’s and 60’s. Enlightenment was the Holy Grail, which would be attained through, marijuana, mescaline and LSD. Easy Rider and On the Road are the eponymous examples which left an indelible mark on the genre. Sebastian Silva’s Crystal Fairy &The Magical Cactus and 2012 actually is dated or postdated, as it were, for a reason. Now the spiritual search has not only lost its virginity. It’s an aging whore. Jamie (Michael Cera) is an American in Chile who suffers from a kind of OCD regarding hallucinatory experience itself. Though he doesn’t realize it, he’s a burgeoning addict. Silva’s brilliance lies in not reducing the malady to the usual hand wringing. Through Silva’s lens we see Jamie as a compulsive seeker for the drug that will free him from being what he is. He meets up with another American, Crystal Fairy (Gaby Hoffmann). On the surface, she’s a later day love child (nicknamed Crystal Hairy because of her unshaved armpits and pubic hair) who regards sugar as a toxin, but sees nothing wrong with drugs. But she too isn’t easily reduced. As a teenager she’d been raped and while the tension between her and Jamie always revolves around her quest for meaning and beauty in the face of his drive to simply get high, she turns out to be a dominatrix who assaults her slaves with a strap-on. One scene at the beginning of the film tells the whole story and it alludes back to an iconic scene in another drug soused film, Trainspotting. Jamie’s at a party and takes a monster dump that doesn’t flush. In Trainspotting the drugs disappear down the toilet. So here’s drug taking circa 2012—pure shit. The actual drug that the characters in the movie seek derives from cooking a cactus found in Northern Chile, but it’s almost an afterthought. Jamie and Crystal (whose real name turns out to be Isabelle) learn something, but you wonder if it’s because of the drugs or the interpersonal ordeal, that takes place in the process of trying to acquire them.

127 Hours

Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours is a perfect film school assignment. How to make a movie about a guy who is trapped by a rock—more specifically, a rock that pins his arm so that he can’t move from the brooding beauty of a remote crevice that threatens to become his tomb? It’s also a parody of the notion of individualism and independence. The character of Aron (James Franco) is as industrious as the actor who plays him, and whose hyperactive productivity has been widely documented lately. Aron is haunted throughout the action by the fact that he never returned a telephone call from his mother or told anyone where he was going when he set off on his own for the mountains. If he had told someone, they might have noticed he was gone in time to save him. The answer to the film school assignment, if you are not a student but legendary director Danny Boyle, is to have a flair for fantasy and for depicting the mind in a state of shock. The famous toilet sequence of Trainspotting is the embryo of Boyle’s  style, and its swirling appears like a footnote in the scenes involving liquids, whether they be water or urine. On the matter of bodily functions, it’s lucky that the real-life character Franco plays was not a vegetarian, as he might have had qualms about drinking his own blood, as he does to survive in the movie. On the matter of fantasy, there are two kinds that the movie depicts: that which occurs in Aron’s head and that which is played out for the camera Aron uses to record his experience. At one point, Aron realizes his fantasy life when he masturbates while looking at a photo of a female hiker he’d met along the way. “This rock has been waiting for me its entire life, waiting to come here, right here. I’ve been moving towards it my whole life,” he says. Ironically, Aron’s statement is discountenanced by the sudden turn-around of his predicament that the movie so brilliantly portrays. One moment he is free, insouciant, daring reality, and the next he is totally humbled and reduced. There is no build-up, no intimation of the fate that will befall him, unless of course you’ve read the reviews.

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.