CANNES, France — The last time the French director Gaspar Noé was in the Cannes Film Festival, in 2002, it felt as if a hurricane were approaching. The word in the festival halls was that his “Irrevérsible” included a scene with a nine-minute rape, news that seemed to excite some attendees. As it happens, though the buildup is interminable, the assault is briefer. I know because when I saw the film again for review, I timed it since I wanted something to think about besides the sights and sounds of a woman being brutalized: it was my way of resisting Mr. Noé’s obvious interest in assaulting his audience.
Although he remains dedicated to shaking up viewers, to getting under their skins and into their nervous systems, Mr. Noé has mellowed. Despite its unpromising title, “Enter the Void,” his entry at this year’s festival, is an exceptional work, though less because of its story, acting or any of the usual critical markers. What largely distinguishes it, beyond the stunning cinematography, is that this is the work of an artist who’s trying to show us something we haven’t seen before, even while he liberally samples images and ideas from Stanley Kubrick and the entirety of American avant-garde cinema. The grungy milieu and calculated shocks might have been designed to make you flee — even while your attention is tethered to the camera — but, really, these aren’t the point. The point is the filmmaking.
The characters are certainly unmemorable. The main ones are Oscar, a young American (Nathaniel Brown), who lives in Tokyo with his only close relative, his sister, Linda (Paz de la Huerta). He sells drugs, while she dances — though more often decorously droops — at a nightclub adorned with the words money, power and sex, which kind of says it all (or at least sums up the rationale for much of the movie industry). For the first 45 minutes or so, the camera assumes Oscar’s point of view — as if it were lodged on his neck instead of his head — a position that’s rarely used because it’s difficult to sustain since it calls attention to itself. (It’s used almost entirely in the 1946 noir “Lady in the Lake.”)
And then someone dies. If you don’t want to know who, stop reading. Everyone else: Oscar is shot dead by the cops. Instead of dying, his spirit or something floats above his body, which is now curled around a urinal like a fetus. And it keeps floating higher and higher — or, rather, Mr. Noé’s extraordinarily liberated camera does — hovering above rooms and seemingly passing through walls, only then to fly above the jewel-colored cityscape. And it keeps floating, as Oscar’s memories of his recent past start to collide against memories of his more distant past, particularly his childhood with Linda. His memory fragments make this disembodied character palpable: as they do in life, they help define his horizons and explain who he is and how he came to die.
There’s more, including repeated references to the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the repeated use of a strobe effect that summons up the work of avant-garde filmmakers like Paul Sharits and Tony Conrad. When he’s still alive, if barely living, Oscar smokes some drug that sends him on a hallucinatory trip that Mr. Noé represents, over several sustained and engrossing minutes, with images of gaudily colored, mutating, organic-looking shapes, which, with their long, searching tendrils, resemble menacing underwater flowers. Like the strobe effect (which Kubrick also used in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” a significant influence on this movie thematically and visually), these bright, pulsing floral images affect your actual vision, causing you to blink, tear up, refocus or even look away.
Mr. Noé, in other words, gets into your body, which is something that he has always been interested in since his showy first feature, “Carne” (1991). He wants to unsettle and disturb you, not only in the space between your ears, but in the rest of you, too, so that you feel your heart thumping in your chest and the sweat popping on your temples. Some viewers apparently fainted during “Irrevérsible,” and this movie includes its share of stomach-flipping visuals, notably a graphic abortion and its aftermath. But now he’s using pure cinema and not just cheap exploitation tricks to make an impact.
That said, this being Gaspar Noé, and, as a consequence, given to occasional moments of goofy comedy, the movie also includes a hilarious and perhaps even sui generis image of coitus that expresses just how much he wants to get inside his audience.
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