Cannes. "Enter the Void"

By David Hudson on 05/22/2009

[Updated through 5/28]

"The only avant-garde film in Cannes' Competition is Gaspar Noé's 'Enter the Void,' which picks up the gauntlet thrown down by the Wachowskis' 'Speed Racer' of an endlessly malleable cinema of acid-trip colors and plastic gymnastics and runs with it to endless, forceful, and nihilistic results." Daniel Kasman in The Auteurs' Notebook: "Springing from ideas explored in video games from the past ten years and by Stanley Kubrick (stealing from '2001' wholesale but also brilliantly pursuing and exploring 'The Shining'), 'Enter the Void' literally takes a first-person view of its protagonist - a heavily tripping American drug dealer (Nathaniel Brown) living in Tokyo - until he dies and his vision is freed from his body, which proceeds to fly around the city following what happens to his corpse and to his beloved sister (Paz de la Huerta)."

"Although he remains dedicated to shaking up viewers, to getting under their skin and into their nervous systems, Mr Noé has mellowed," argues the New York Times' Manohla Dargis. This "is an exceptional work, though less because of its story, acting or any of the usual critical markers. What largely distinguishes it, beyond the stunning cinematography, is that this is the work of an artist who's trying to show us something we haven't seen before, even while he liberally samples images and ideas from Stanley Kubrick and the entirety of American avant-garde cinema. The grungy milieu and calculated shocks might have been designed to make you flee - even while your attention is tethered to the camera - but, really, these aren't the point. The point is the filmmaking."

"Almost defying definition in contemporary cinematic terms," writes Screen's Mike Goodridge, "Gaspar Noe's third feature film 'Enter The Void' is a wild, hallucinatory mindfuck for adults which sees the director explore new shooting techniques and ambitious special effects to capture a young man's journey after death. More experience than narrative, it runs to a massive 163 minutes, meandering and careening in and out of story and into visual realms and moods that are nothing short of hypnotic. It is a film that will instantly achieve cult status among young adults. If audiences care to, they can lose themselves in Noe's images and trip on his imagination. If they don't, they will be bored to tears."

This is "perhaps the most challenging film to premiere in the Cannes Official Selection this year," blogs Matt Dentler. "I have a soft spot for the enfants terribles like Lukas Moodyson, Carlos Reygadas and Lars Von Trier. What these guys are doing is some of the bravest fictional filmmaking left in the world. And, like these fellow filmmakers, Gaspar Noe may need to go back in and trim his latest work. Not because it shouldn't shock and dare, but because it shouldn't meander."

As noted earlier, for Screen, Geoffrey Macnab reports that Noé "is hatching a sex film. He says the as yet untitled film will be a 'a joyful porn movie - a joyful movie with explicit sex.'"

Update: "Noé shows none of the excellent flourishes he used in 'Irréversible,'" writes David Bourgeois for Movieline: "the clever and effective use of flashbacks and reverse chronological storytelling used to weave the gripping story of a Paris woman savagely raped. Instead, we get a laughable and pointless mélange of flashbacks leading up to the shooting (which yields the following information: Oscar was a drug dealer), and scene upon scene of spectacularly colorful drug-induced hallucinations. Speaking of laughable, a few notes about the acting, if you can call it that. It's so atrocious, that it's a wonder if it was intentional, though I think that's giving Noé far too much credit.... To be fair, Noé rushed to get this print to Cannes - there weren't even open or closing credits or a title sequence. But even at two hours let's say, it's still unwatchable."

Updates, 5/23: "Billed by director Gaspar Noé as a 'psychedelic melodrama' inspired by his hallucinogen-powered screening of 'Lady in the Lake,' 'Enter the Void' suggests the Gallic provocateur should get some better drugs," writes Rob Nelson in Variety. "Not clever enough to be truly pretentious, Noé's tiresomely gimmicky film about a low-level Tokyo drug dealer who enjoys one long, last trip after dying proves to be the ne plus ultra of nothing much. Having come in under the wire for Cannes competition, 'Enter the Void' may once again be ready to enter the editing room."

"It goes without saying that the film is violent, but its obsessive emphasis on sex and drugs - to the point that most viewers are going to feel utterly bludgeoned by both - makes it virtually unwatchable, especially at its unofficial 'director's cut' length of 160 minutes," writes Peter Brunette in the Hollywood Reporter. "Couples coupling in fascinatingly diverse ways are shown over and over, and the whole thing ends in a kind of apocalyptic and ultra-silly sperm-meets-egg apotheosis that seems shot by what one wag of a critic later labeled a 'vagina-cam.' It also is suggested that Oscar's spirit crashes into a baby named Oscar in a plane flying overhead, presumably leading to his reincarnation."

"In terms of sheer mindblowing formal astonishment, Gaspar Noé's 'Enter the Void' is the movie I've been waiting for the entire festival," writes Mike D'Angelo at the AV Club. "It wouldn't be quite accurate to say it's like nothing you've ever seen, because you may have seen Noé's 'Irréversible,' which he now claims amounted to an elaborate test run for this project. I can believe it, even though - as sometimes happens - the sketch turned out superior to the actual canvas.... If only the movie's moronic content didn't keep distracting you from its exhilarating form."

"Gaspar Noé's 'Enter the Void' is disquieting and dreamy, as much a psychologically charged space as it is a conventional film narrative," blogs Scott Macaulay at Filmmaker. "Noé's decadent Tokyo riff on the 'Tibetan Book of the Dead' is structured around births, a death, and finds its twists through hypnotic tracking shots, strobe-lit effects and vertiginous clockwheeled pans. The film conceives its own sense of filmic structure, which makes the criticism that it's too long a bit puzzling to me. In that the consciousness of the protagonist becomes largely inaccessible to the viewer in the film's second half, I suppose this section is challenging, but to me that's where its eeriest psychological moments are. I liked it a lot."

"A massive narrative failure with simplistic plot devices, subpar acting and a droning structural approach that begs to be not trimmed but amputated, 'Void' nevertheless represents some of the most inventive filmmaking at the fest," writes Stephen Garrett at Time Out New York. "If there's one thing to be said about Cannes, it's the fact that three thousand people patiently sat through Noe's kaleidoscope of explicit images."

Updates, 5/26: "It cannot be denied that Noe is making an attempt to radically redefine the rules of cinema, and has succeeded in that he's made a film that looks like nothing that you've ever seen," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "Comparisons to Kubrick have been made, but they barely scratch the surface; the only thing that comes close, for me, as reference to understanding what it feels like to watch this film, is to suggest that you imagine a two and a half hour live action remake of the flying stuff from 'Waking Life,' with that film's dimestore philosophy replaced with stoner TIbetan Buddhist claptrap, incest anxiety and a lot (a lot a lot a lot a lot) of naked, writhing Paz de la Huerta. That 'Enter the Void' would be destined to become a college classic if anyone dared to release it is to essentially say two things: its innovation is entirely at the service of saying nothing worth contemplating whilst lucid, and that doesn't really matter because it's so visually seductive that it essentially flips the brain off switch for you."

Christoph Huber at La lectora provisoria: "Peranson>, correctly, right after the screening: 'Conceivably, the most stupid film ever made.'"

Update, 5/28: "Noé's self-proclaimed 'psychedelic melodrama' arrived 15 minutes longer than the published 150-minute running time, leading to widespread speculation that the Cannes version was in fact 'unfinished' - a generous designation for a film that should never have been started in the first place," writes LA Weekly's Scott Foundas. "Yet in Cannes, where no empty provocation is without its perverse defenders, there were some (including, rumor had it, at least one jury member) who praised 'Enter the Void' as a work of visual virtuosity, perhaps agreeing with the movie's zonked-out protagonist that 'dying would be the ultimate trip, you know?'"

Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 2009.

[Photo: "Enter the Void," Wild Bunch, 2009]

Tags: Cannes 2009, Gaspar Noé, Nathaniel Brown, Paz de la Huerta