Entering the Void

 

Part I: The Development of a Style

As the release of Enter the Void in its original director’s cut is hitting video, more people are getting a chance to see the full version of Gaspar Noe’s controversial and challenging visual epic. For a lot of people I know, the circumstance is that they are coming to be acquainted with the famed French director for the first time. While his previous two films have their own mantles for challenging audiences, the idea of making this film the introduction to his work seems to be fraught for experience’s sake. Some of us have grown up with Noe and followed his every filmmaking step with interest and optimism. Reward can be found by seeing Enter the Void as standalone, but I think a disservice is done when you don’t take the rest of his filmography into consideration. A brief progress report is in order because if I was to stop Noe’s career right now and make marker of it, his new film is a masterpiece.

By the rate which Gaspar Noe is doubling his ambition with every film, it would be easy to see him as a version of James Joyce in that every film is a new attempt to pick axe a new granite in his filmmaking. Also, like Joyce, his career is filled by a fewer number of projects. My coronation to his films came with his first full length feature, I Stand Alone. By judgment today, it’s a beginner work and displays marginal stylistic ambition. The meat is in the structural focus and how Noe aligns the story of a father kidnapping his daughter from an institution and molesting her while on the run and turns it into an unflinching look at a gut wrenching situation of moral depravity. Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver is considered a benchmark for looking at an immoral dweller in a depraved world. By permissiveness sake, I Stand Alone registers on more levels of discomfort. If the press clippings of both films are to be considered, they are cultural representations of the worst looks at their respective societies. When Taxi Driver was released in 1976, it got a wave of accommodation around the world.  Less for Noe’s work, but I digress…

However, the nectar of the protagonist in I Stand Alone has no moral redemption factor. Travis Bickle at least has foolishness, ignorance and misguided methods to be his stepping stones to violence. Not all the steps make sense. Some contradict each other, but when the film ends on an ambiguous note of whether he actually stood a chance to get the girl in the end, the film is announcing its lack of interest to fulfill a full look into what the consequences would be for someone who goes the full route for violence. The film even steps back from dwelling further into the psychological contradictions in his psyche. The end is a familiar pull to make the audience reaffirm a simple interest in a slight character from earlier in the film. Some may argue Bickle is experiencing a hospital delusion and the final scene never happens. Sure, yet all the delusion is does is make a tidbit part of the story its everlasting question/portrait of the entire story. I Stand Alone has no genre stand back to the subject.

Compared to other European films, I Stand Alone is not too dissimilar from various experiments and modes of storytelling. At the time, the novelty of the film was that it was credited for helping to create French Shock cinema. The label was just a reflection of what a few filmmakers were making unexpectedly popular in France.  A version of horror, the appeal led to a few international hits, but beyond that, not too much was accomplished. When Gaspar Noe made Irreversible a few years later, he seemed to epitomize the potential of French Shock Cinema by taking a brutal crime and enlarging it to a full nightmare reenactment. Instead of just have the gall to be explicit about a taboo situation, Noe blossomed his style by making his camera fully inventive and moving to the flux of a constantly changing story of different moods and levels. Since a nightmare is a mind altering take on reality where physical boundaries aren’t relevant, the introduction of a sweeping camera to fully emphasize the drug feeling of being in a dream is what was Noe’s major style development.

The shortcoming in Irreversible is that the story tries to outdistance the visualizations. To make nightmare scenario relevant, the film labors over a structured storyline of a day that is constantly moving backward. So, the film starts from the end credits and shows the disastrous conclusion at the beginning. I won’t get into plot details (you can look it up), but the subsequent revelations is how each previous scene tells another side of what was originally witnessed at the end of the day. However, the wind down from the beginning is huge. Noe overplays the debauchery and violence of filmmaking for the conclusion so when he cools the tone of the film to relay emotional difference for the characters when every fiber of their being isn’t being challenged, he starts asking the dialogue to do too much theme communication for the audience. The story starts to overplay things the audience knows will come into contention later on, but Noe feels compelled paint story situations which make for easy contradiction angles. The story runs the talking a little dry and exasperated. Only a small scene with Monica Bellucci discovering something about herself at the very beginning feels natural and insightful to the better parts of the film.

Many directors are excellent with specific styles and structures but fall apart when they have to marry other production elements together. Often, story is a downfall. The major development in Irreversible is that Noe isn’t just style and structure first, but his favored style has little referential history with other styles in cinema history. As much as filmmakers generally are not critics and not consciously working to impress upon what other critical benchmarks that other filmmakers have done, they still take many cues from other films and try to integrate their preferred styles into the discussion of other filmmakers. During the most stylistic moments of Irreversible, Noe allows the free-wheeling camera work to be the full enunciation of his tricks and mechanisms. Instead of allow the device to be a mechanism to branch out to other modes of styles, the only real change is tone and story structure. The single note approach reminds me of filmmakers who wanted to single out stories by focusing on one thing. Generally, these films are simple structure. There is Lady in the Lake from the 1940s which was just a first person viewpoint and other European films which believed that a story should be told with no edits of time and be done in full real time replication.

When a film makes a conscious decision to be about one thing, it is inherently limiting itself. In the situation of Lady in the Lake, technology was not behind the film to make a full first person story believable and real time films suffer if the story itself is not fully compelling or gripping. As the audience peers into the story, they become bored by a film that does not leave any residue on the side and languishes over a large amount of dullness. Since the dullness generally is aimed for structure concerns and has little meaning toward themes, the finished product leaves a lot to be desired. It is why most filmmakers work within understandable genre rules and structured ideas of stylization. Genres have been pulled and twisted in a million ways. The history gives new directors the chance to both be historical and new. It is commonplace for a film today to amass references to many genres references and still mainly be one kind of story. The full inundation of references between genres feels post modern, but meshing together has always been around.

Enter the Void is a first person perspective about a man traveling through death in search of his rebirth. 15 minutes into the film, he dies and his spirit spends the rest of the film levitating around the events of his closest friends and family from his life. During other sequences, he revisits the experience of his past. The tidal wave of different out-of-body experience helps to guide him to find the path for rebirth. It’s just the chaos of revisiting his every psychological trauma and conflict with others. The depth of story is there and Noe bases the entire film on two slivers of style: first person filmmaking and his free roaming camera work. The first person is mainly felt when he is alive or experiencing his past or imagining himself seducing his sister (a torn and complicated relationship itself) and the free roaming camera is allotted to the bulk of his death experience. The camera hovers above the characters and goes from place to place. The spirit of the main character is unbound by reality. Noe needed a nightmare basis to make Irreversible happen for story idea. It was about a few characters and one devastating subject. The majority of the full distortion lasts around 45 minutes. All Noe has take on in Enter the Void is a full idea of a death experience which sees the past and the present. The topic itself is a major subject.

The majority of Enter the Void is an experience. Noe only knows one major method of stylization, but he finds so many ways yield his talents that the film feels endless in its drive to circumvent any possibility for cliche or relaxation. In the next part, I will consider why he makes the choices he does in the film and how it helps to lift up the themes in the story for full experience potential. For right now, I want to comment on how what Noe does reminds me of how a painter operates. A critic will focus on an artist’s brushwork and methods to re-assert reality or a version of it in full mass. Painting can be referential in that since many painters start out by under other painters, they borrow methods and style points. Still, painting cannot be fully referential the film generally is. The breath of a painting is based on methods and mannerisms and how they are repeated over a canvas.

In textural painting, the first thing noticed is the repetition and similarities between each brushstroke. However, as the observer sees when they look further, there are many more lines of variance. Technically, Gaspar Noe only can do so much by relying on his camera techniques, but he finds so many ways to gradually re-draw the lines of a style that looks too repetitive on paper. Like with a painting, the viewer feels the breath of his constantly moving brushes over the story. Throughout the story, the film manages to repeat, contradict, and invert itself all the while expanding because the circumstances of its basic situation of a dead man trying to find his way back into life through rebirth. When I was finished watching the film, it felt fuller and deeper than any other I had seen in some time. It was a basic reaction on my part since the film went deeper into a story than what I thought was possible, but what I realized is that for the first time in my living film history, a film managed stand aside from the referential library and be only about one stylized vision and it felt as large as any other film which had every advantage ahead of time. Not a bad feat.