Enter the Void

Gaspar Noé – 2009 – France

Clearly designed to become the ultimate head movie of the 21st century, which indeed it may be, Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void is nevertheless impaired by the strenuous degree to which it takes itself so seriously.  After scoring and smoking some DMT somewhere in Tokyo, a hero whose point-of-view the camera adopts “enters” a club called “the Void” (get it?), gets shot, dies, and floats around the area as a disembodied spirit, alternately wafting in and out of actual events, memories, and dissipating into the cosmos, I guess.  If it sounds intriguing, it is, but it’s also amazingly turgid for a film with no actual plot or drama.  Wasted repeatedly without concern by the pretentious Noé are endless opportunities for humor, whimsy, and genuine existential debate.  The movies that pot-heads and acid-freaks flocked to in the 60s – (such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Yellow Submarine and revivals of Fantasia) – still functioned to a straight audience, even kids, even while those of a mind to found much in them that was trippy, psychedelic and profound in a fuzzy kind of way.  Never a huge fan of Noé, I couldn’t help but be bothered during this film’s opening 20-30 minutes by the fact that this first-person, subjective type of camerawork has been done before and better by older filmmakers that Noé is gambling you’ve never heard of.  Robert Montgomery’s The Lady in the Lake (1947) comes to mind; a film that prolonged the first-person POV throughout its entire length.  Ultimately, though, everyone who found the technique interesting and occasionally useful, from Welles to Hitchcock, abandoned it as unsuitable to maintaining any kind of emotion or drama.  Noé has no interest in that, though, as he is content to merely let you trip out behind the eyeballs of someone you know absolutely nothing about and cannot possibly identify with.  Since we can’t identify with him, why adopt the POV shot for so long?  Isn’t that like an interminable close-up of someone wearing a mask?  Finally, the movie concludes with the most preposterous cliché; something that I assume seemed really deep to Noé but which I – (both as a filmgoer and a thinking human being) – could never buy into in a million years.  This ending, to me, is no less a cornball cop-out than what you’d find in any Hollywood romantic comedy.  As always, I have to grudgingly give Noé credit for continuing to attempt experiments away from standard narrative lines, but why is it that he settles for bludgeoning and depressing his audience while others like Luis Buñuel and Robert Altman managed to make so many essentially plotless films that delighted and invigorated us?  As far as thought-provoking surreal movies go, I still much prefer Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty, Ken Russells’ Altered States, David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, Richard LInklater's Slacker; stuff like that.  Yeah, I'm an old stick-in-the-mud.