Directed by Gaspar Noé. Starring Nathaniel Brown, Paz de la Huerta, Cyril Roy, Emily Alyn Lind, Jesse Kuhn, Olly Alexander Club, IFI, Dublin, 135 min
YOU COULDN'T say that Enter the Voidwasn't an ordeal. Like trying to understand an inarticulate teenager as he explains his passion for Chuck Palahniuk in a cacophonous disco, the experience seems designed to make viewers feel old, cynical, bored, nauseous and slightly convulsive.
Still, it’s the sort of ordeal you probably need to endure. Nobody should die without having broken a bone, got lost in a foreign capital or become drunk to the point of vomiting. Gaspar Noé’s epic exercise in psychedelic posturing is, for all its rampaging flaws, a similarly character-building trial.
It is a full seven years since Noé disturbed viewers with that unflinching nine-minute rape sequence in the hugely (for once the word is justified) controversial Irréversible. No individual incident in Enter the Voidis quite so jarring, but the film's girth and relentlessness renders it equally unsettling.
The opening of the picture, largely shot from the protagonist’s point of view, follows Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), an American drug dealer in Tokyo, as, following the ingestion of some awful chemical, he makes his way to an appointment at a seedy bar. Before Oscar has a chance to pass over his wares, the police break in and he flees for the lavatory. When he foolishly claims to have a gun, the cops shoot through the door and he collapses in a bloody, doomed mess.
The rest of the picture is viewed from the perspective of the dead man’s soul – that must be the word, mustn’t it? – as he drifts about Tokyo and visits traumatic incidents from his eventful past. We learn that his parents died in a ghastly car crash and that he has always been dubiously close to his sister. We watch as he starts an affair with a friend’s mother. We fret as that sister, after herself being lured to Tokyo, falls in with a bad crowd and takes up work as an exotic dancer.
Anybody who has seen Irréversibleor Seul Contre Tous, Noé's gruesome debut, will know to expect an all-out audiovisual assault. Beginning with honking music and the usual Soviet-style credits – flashed aggressively and hugely – the film features muttered dialogue and a soundtrack that blends such obvious pieces as Air on the G Stringwith that characteristic Noé subwoofer rumble. The camera spends a great deal of time on the ceiling, but occasionally descends to fly through gaping wounds, within pulsating vulvas and across recently aborted foetuses. You know the sort of thing.
It is easy to dismiss Noé's horrifying melange as the work of a one-trick pony, but it does remain quite some trick. If one goes on the same ghost train only once every seven years then one should still find the experience passably unnerving. This time round, adding some sub- 2001hallucinatory graphics to the package, the director abandons all restraint and asks the viewer to indulge in the Total Noé Experience. For at least half of the film's absurdly extended 135 minutes, the carnival ride does what it should. You certainly couldn't imagine any other director delivering these effects in these proportions.
What a shame, then, that, on an intellectual level, Into the Void(that title alone!) plays like the work of an only modestly bright 12-year-old.
Is that character really reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead? Are you really equating sexual nuzzling with an Oedipal desire for the mother’s breast? Are you really taking us within the woman’s body to watch a giant penis propel its goods towards a waiting ovum? Drugs? How cool. How naughty. Abortion. How dangerous. How transgressive. Implied incest? How unutterably predictable, juvenile and boring.
Imagine a film made by the kids who hang around Jim Morrison’s grave in Père Lachaise cemetery and you will get some sense of the intellectual fatuousness of this project. Still, for all its stupidity, you probably do have to see the wretched thing. Just once, mind.
