For French director Gaspar Noé every ending is a beginning: his last film, Irreversible, begins at the end and is told backwards while this latest starts with the death of its lead character, from whose point of view we see the rest of the film. Oscar has invited to Tokyo Linda, the sister from whom he was split in childhood when their parents died in a car crash. Linda finds work as a stripper to supplement Oscar's income from drugs - and, it seems, as a gigolo to a friend's mum - but he's killed when a deal goes wrong.
Like Irreversible, Enter the Void is filled with strobe effects - Noé has no interest in courting an epileptic fanbase - a club with a bad name (The Void) and even a self-referential gag, where the director's name serves as a contact for a dealer. There's plenty of neon and fractals, a predominant breast fixation, as well as some guff about the Tibetan Book of the Dead that purports to serve as the film's philosophical frame. (I don't know what it is about Tokyo that sends Occidental directors bonkers: Sofia Coppola, Hal Hartley, Wim Wenders...)
I once described an author's role in one book as more like directing traffic, and there's something of that in Noé. He is undoubtedly technically very accomplished but much of his recent work is about the camera hitting its marks and orchestrating the cast to meet theirs; he's not someone to provoke great performances from his stars. All directors should be in control of their material, but the great ones have something to say, too. In Enter the Void, death is described as the 'ultimate trip' but highs are like dreams: you shouldn't share them with other people.
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