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.

Domino Theory

We’ve now invited the Iranians to the talks on what to do about ISIS (“After a US Shift, Iran Has a Seat at Talks on War in Syria,” NYT, 10/28/15) and president Obama has announced that ground troops will aid the Kurds in Northern Syria on the Turkish border (“Obama Sends Special Operations Forces to Help Fight ISIS in Syria,” NYT, 10/30/15) By the way is the motivation for these initiatives to aid in the war against ISIS or merely to even the playing field with the Russians? But the Iranians support the Shiite Houthis who are the enemies of our allies, the Saudis, in Yemen and the same Kurds who are fighting ISIS have also been involved in a long territorial against the Turks, also strategic allies of the US. Have you ever been in a business situation where you allied yourself with a one time enemy against another common enemy, knowing that that you will, at the end of the struggle in question, inevitably part ways and resume your original adversarial stance? That's the position we find ourselves in with the Russians who are also sometimes allies with us against ISIS. Benjamin Netanyahu told congress “So when it comes to Iran and ISIS, the enemy of your enemy is your enemy” and if he is right, it doesn’t bode well for the game of musical beds that might describe our current foreign policy. To quote the title of the George Roy Hill film about returning Korean War vets we’ll have gone through a Period of Adjustment that could lead us right back to where we started. The Kurds with be at war with the Turks, the Shiite Iranians at war with Saudi Arabia, Iraq and any other strongholds of Sunni political power, with the Iranians resuming the rhetoric which identifies the United States as the great satan. It’s a proxy war with both East and West facing off under the camouflage of their  respective clients, the largest of which may be Bashar al-Assad who is Vladmir Putin’s most expensive Middle East chip. During the Cold War "spheres of influence" was a term that was often bandied about to describe this kind of thinking. Another iteration, "the domino theory," accounted for the underlying paranoia about what would happen when a major power’s sphere of influence was threatened.

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.