Nobody can call Gaspar Noé a bad filmmaker - (well I suppose they can if they want to) -
because he does what he sets out to do, which is primarily to make the audience queasy. Personally, I don't enjoy that so much, but
his films are certainly effective.
Believing, as I do, that art should be beautiful, I can't get very enthusiastic
about the relentless ugliness of Noé's
films. It's not just a matter of
content, but style and overall philosophy.
Gilliam and Cronenberg, for example, address problems just as dark,
often graphically, with few happy endings, but the presentation is always
aesthetically pleasing rather than (for lack of a better word) abusive. Their style is classical, while Noé's is pedantically post-modern, an
amalgamation of surface affects in everyone from Godard to Tarantino to Mike
Leigh. Again, none of this is all that
terrible; it just doesn't resonate with me.
The film is about an extremely misanthropic out-of-work butcher (Philippe
Nahon) who seethes a lot while thinking to himself about how much he hates
everyone. After pounding a pregnant
woman's belly to induce an abortion, eventually he realizes that maybe incest
with his mentally disabled daughter will bring him some happiness. Yes, what a wonderful world we live in.
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