"Enter the Void", de Gaspar Noé (primeros 150 segundos de película)

Además del trailer, la distribuidora estadounidense de "Enter the Void", la película de 2009 de Gaspar Noé, decidió poner online los primeros 150 segundos de la película, tratando sin dudas de captar adeptos a partir de la inicial espectacularidad de las imágenes. No la vi la película, así que no puedo opinar, pero en general ha sido recibido con bastante frialdad, o peor que eso...

A Filmmaker Returns to Cannes to Chase a Spirit (The New York Times)

By MANOHLA DARGIS

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.

"Enter the Void", de Gaspar Noé (Variety)

By Rob Nelson

A Fidelite, BUF, Wild Bunch presentation, with the participation of Canal Plus, Eurimages, Ministere de la Culture et de la Communication (CNC), Filmforderungsanstalt (FFA). (International sales: Wild Bunch, Paris.) Produced by Brahim Chioua, Vincent Maraval, Olivier Delbosc, Marc Missonnier, Pierre Buffin, Gaspar Noe. Directed, written by Gaspar Noe.

With: Nathaniel Brown, Paz de la Huerta, Cyril Roy, Emily Alyn Lind, Jesse Kuhn, Olly Alexander, Masato Tanno, Cary Hayes, Sara Stockbridge, Sakiko Fukuhara, Nobu Imai, Emi Takeuchi, Janice Sicotte-Beliveau, Simon Chamberland.

Billed by director Gaspar Noe as a "psychedelic melodrama" inspired by his hallucinogen-powered screening of "Lady in the Lake," "Enter the Void" suggests the Gallic provocateur should get some better drugs. Not clever enough to be truly pretentious, Noe's tiresomely gimmicky film about a low-level Tokyo drug dealer who enjoys one long, last trip after dying proves to be the ne plus ultra of nothing much. Having come in under the wire for Cannes competition, "Enter the Void" may once again be ready to enter the editing room.

While the overall audacity of the project can't easily be denied, "Enter the Void" delivers an altogether different kind of pain than the director's earlier pair of punishing provocations, "I Stand Alone" and "Irreversible." Not even Noe's detractors expect his work to be boring, but, at 162 minutes, the new film has more than its share of longueurs -- despite showing what happens after death as seeing a lot of people having sex.

Noe's opening scene of a Kubrickian "star child" journey -- triggered by the dope-smoking dealer's repeated tokes -- sends false promises that "Enter the Void" will be a methamphetamine-era version of the ultimate trip in "2001."

But, the film contains only a half-dozen or so vision-questing shots that could help it to pass as avant-garde. Some viewers will nonetheless insist on calling this an exercise in pure cinema; many others will prefer to describe it as pure trash.

Including graphic images of an abortion procedure, "Enter the Void" eventually becomes a vulgar version of a kid's "Where did I come from?" query, complete with a shot from the p.o.v. of an egg-bound sperm. It begins, though, merely as a puerile fantasy of what happens after death.

In the course of a drug deal gone bad, young Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) dies from a gunshot wound in the filthy toilet stall of the Void, a club that some will insist is of the same corpus as the Rectum in "Irreversible." Never subtle, Noe unleashes a literally flashy stroboscopic effect as our hero breaks on through to the other side.

Flashbacks reveal Oscar to have made a childhood promise to his sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta) -- now a stripper -- that he'd never leave her. True to his pledge, and despite having been cremated, Oscar floats spectrally through Tokyo.

Via digital effects, the camera -- i.e., Oscar's watchful spirit -- seems to fly above city streets, up the sides of skyscrapers, through walls, and down various passages including a fallopian tube and, appropriately, a sewer.

For better or worse, the film's production team has adequately fulfilled the director's wishes, which include far too many sweeping shots of neon-bathed Tokyo at night.

In terms of style, the film does begin with a certain integrity, mirroring the fully subjective approach of "Lady in the Lake," Robert Montgomery's 1947 noir. But soon enough, the camera is all over the place -- spiraling into the void of Oscar's bullet hole and out of a child's playground crawl space, for example.

In another stylistic copout, the film's many flashback scenes aren't arranged according to the character's drug- and death-induced free associations, but rather based on Noe's sense of what rudimentary info his audience may require to follow the barebones narrative.

Notwithstanding de la Huerta's full-frontal turn, the actors often perform with their backs to the camera. The film's English dialogue, exceedingly banal and overemphatically delivered, seems designed for international screening sans subtitles or dubbing. The soundtrack alternates between Christian organ music, bass-heavy club beats, and a persistent churning noise familiar to those who've seen Noe's other films.

More than two hours in, as Noe's camera roves at random through the so-called Love Hotel, the film peaks with a series of explicit sex scenes. The last of countless putative endings finds the director suggesting that after the one's umbilical cord is cut, it's all downhill from there.

In Cannes, the film was screened sans credits save for "ENTER" at the beginning and, aptly enough, "THE VOID" at the end.

More than one option

• (Co) Canal Plus
  Filmography, Year, Role
• (Co) Canal Plus
  Filmography, Year, Role

More than one option

• (Person) Robert Montgomery
  Narrator, Director, Camera
• (Person) Robert Montgomery
  Digital Effects Artist, Digital Effects

Camera (DV, widescreen), Benoit Debie; editors, Noe, Marc Boucrot, Jerome Pesnel; production designers, Kikuo Ohta, Jean Carriere; costume designers, Tony Crosbie, Nicoletta Massone; sound (Dolby Digital), Ken Yasumoto; sound mixers, Ryotaro Harada, Claude Lahaye; re-recording sound mixer, Lars Ginzel; visual effects artistic director, Pierre Buffin; visual effects supervisor, Geoffrey Niquet; associate producers, Philippe Bober, Valerio de Paolis, Nicolas Leclerq; assistant directors, Jimbo Hideaki, Toshio Hanaoka, Michael Williams. Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (competing), May 22, 2009. Running time: 162 MIN.

A Time and Space Oddysey (The Auteurs)

By Daniel Kasman

The only avant-garde film in Cannes’ Competition is Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void, which picks up the gauntlet thrown down by the Wachowskis’ Speed Racer of an endlessly malleable cinema of acid-trip colors and plastic gymnastics and runs with it to endless, forceful, and nihilistic results. The problem the Wachowskis couldn’t solve was perspective—how to justify in their story what they were showing visually. That film took risks, but could neither explain why, nor push those risk far enough due to a reliance on Hollywood restrictions of story and content. Noé, the man behind Irreversible, has no such problems. Springing from ideas explored in video games from the past ten years and by Stanley Kubrick (stealing from 2001 wholesale but also brilliantly pursuing and exploring The Shining), Enter the Void literally takes a first-person view of its protagonist—a heavily tripping American drug dealer (Nathaniel Brown) living in Tokyo—until he dies and his vision is freed from his body, which proceeds to fly around the city following what happens to his corpse and to his beloved sister (Paz de la Huerta).

Noé shoots Enter the Void under the illusion the entire film is one long take that segues between points of view: the first-person, seen-through-the-eyes of view of the living boy; a third-person, over-the-shoulder view of the boy’s life seen in flashbacks; and the hyper-third-person, God’s eye view of the boy’s floating consciousness. That last one takes up most of the film and is the most structurally interesting, as Noé suggests an entire elimination of editing in his film by camera movement. Instead of cutting between sequential events, the camera cranes out of a room and them swoops over Tokyo, passing though other buildings and rooms before landing in the next scene. If time has passed between one scene and the next, instead of literally transversing physical space Noé’s camera—again, the dead boy’s view point—achieves a metaphysical ability, plunging into lights and traveling through a psychedelic ether to emerge, on the other side, some time and space later. These transitions may grow tedious as this nearly three-hour movie goes on and one realizes every time we have to change scenes we literally have to travel between all this space and time, but the literal visualization of what happens between an edit is unexpectedly like watching film theory come to life. More than anything else, Enter the Void is indeed an experiment in visualization, of taking conventional ideas of focalization in dramatic cinema—what perspective a story is told from—which usually lurk quasi-invisibility under the surface of storytelling, and flips the emphasis on its head. Instead of seeing a story visualized, we see the visualization of a story.

If I haven’t talked much about this story it’s because there isn’t much of one. Enter the Void takes place in a nocturnal world of drug trips, heavy bass house music, strip clubs and love hotels, and an extreme heightening of the most clichéd visual trope of Japanese cities, florescent neon. It is a grimly vacant world, a place evacuated of characters, of morality, of sentimentality, of drama. There is nothing to care about, except the visual splendor, invention, and ideas that move through this emptiness. While Noé grossly missteps in reaching for 2001’s stars of grand structuralist explorations of birth, life, and death, Enter the Void is a vision of a kind of mainstream post-mainstream film that knowingly eliminates all that might be poignant about cinema beyond aesthetics. And aesthetics are all that remain: the slickly uncomfortable flow of the false long takes that walk down streets and stairs, plunge into throbbing clubs, move through characters heads, take on the point of view of semen—all are ideas turned into moving images, audacious but lifeless, vibrant and morose.

"Enter the Void", de Gaspar Noé (Promedio: 2,70)

Competencia oficial

Rudiger Suchsland (Frankfurter Allgemeine, Germany) - 5
Violeta Kovacsics (Lumiere, España) - 4
Diego Batlle (La Nación, Otroscines, Argentina) - 3
Pamela Bienzobas (Mabuse, Chile) - 4
Christoph Hüber (Die Presse, Austria) - 1
Luciano Monteagudo (Página/12, Argentina) - 1
Dana Linssen (De Filmkrant, Holland) - 4
Manu Yáñez (Fotogramas, España) - 2
Cristina Nord (Taz, Germany) - 0 ("qué película más terrible...")
Ernesto Garratt (El Mercurio, Chile) - 3

Promedio: 2,70

"Enter the Void", de Gaspar Noé (Screen)

By Mike Goodridge

Dir: Gaspar Noé, France. 2009. 163mins.

Almost defying definition in contemporary cinematic terms, Gaspar Noe’s third feature film Enter The Void is a wild, hallucinatory mindfuck for adults which sees the director explore new shooting techniques and ambitious special effects to capture a young man’s journey after death. More experience than narrative, it runs to a massive 163 minutes, meandering and careening in and out of story and into visual realms and moods that are nothing short of hypnotic. It is a film that will instantly achieve cult status among young adults. If audiences care to, they can lose themselves in Noe’s images and trip on his imagination. If they don’t, they will be bored to tears.

Bound to divide critics and audiences as decisively as 2002’s Irreversible, Enter The Void is clearly the work of a visionary mind who plunges into darkness literally and thematically at any given opportunity. Scenes here – from the graphic performance of an abortion to extensive drug use, violence and frequent, explicit sex acts – will render it a limited distribution prospect with the most prohibitive censorship ratings available. But with his first two features Seul Contre Tous and Irreversible, Noe has built a loyal following bound to lap up his latest no-holds-barred opus. Life on DVD could be even more profitable, and adventurous viewers will no doubt adopt the film as an accompaniment for booze and drugs use.

Still unfinished in its Cannes competition screening – and 13 minutes longer than the festival had advertised – Enter The Void begins from the subjective vision of the lead character, an American slacker and budding drug dealer called Oscar (Brown) living in Tokyo, complete with blinks that block out the image every few seconds. 30 minutes into the film, he is killed and from then on the characters and buildings are viewed from above as if he is watching.

Noe’s use of crane shots both in Tokyo, in studios and in modelwork is staggeringly original, and he tracks characters through the city by speeding over the buildings from aerial vantage points.

The film starts as Oscar’s sister Linda (the ever-naked De La Huerta) leaves the apartment they share to go to work and he then experiments with DMT – a drug which occurs in the brain during an accident or at point of death. While he is in mid-trip (which Noe visualises using animated spirals), Oscar gets a phone call from his English friend Victor (Alexander) asking him to bring his drugs to a local bar called The Void. He is joined by his Alex (Cyril Roy), a drug buddy of Oscar’s whom Linda disapproves of.

But when Oscar walks into the bar, he realises that it is a setup and the police chase him into the toilet, eventually shooting him dead.

From then on, Oscar’s spirit can only observe as Alex goes on the run from the police, Linda falls apart after his death and finds that she is pregnant by her clubowner boyfriend Bruno (Cary Hayes) and Victor is racked by guilt at his role in the incident.

But Noe also tracks back in time, to Oscar and Linda’s childhood where we see the horrific car crash which killed their parents, and to the days leading up to Oscar’s death in which Victor finds out that Oscar slept with his mother.

As the film enters its third hour, the plot goes out of focus as the film starts to explore sexuality and the creation of new life. A lengthy final sequence tracks couples having sex in Love Hotel (a studio creation based on the Japanese concept of love hotels) and new life is created. Indeed Noe actually shows us the penis ejaculating into the vagina in full frame glory.

The characters are all fairly uninteresting and some are indeed loathsome, but that is not the point. The film defies cinema convention in every way. It is almost like an adult video game with no rules, or an art installation which evolves into something immersive and sensory. One thing is certain. Spiked with all the tricks, sound effects and technological invention at Noe’s disposal, Enter The Void is a trip.

Production companies
Wild Bunch
Fidelite Films
Buf Compagnie
Les Cinemas De La Zone

International sales
Wild Bunch
(33) 53 10 42 56

Producers
Brahim Chioua
Vincent Maraval
Olivier Delbosc
Marc Missonier
Pierre Buffin
Gaspar Noé

Cinematography
Benoit Debie

Production design
Kikuo Ohta
Gene Carriere

Editor
Gaspar Noé
Marc Boucrot
Jerome Pesnel

Main cast
Nathaniel Brown
Paz De La Huerta
Cyril Roy
Emily Alyn Lind
Jesse Kuhn

Gaspar Noe goes hardcore (Screen)

Maverick director Gaspar Noe, whose feature Enter The Void is screening in competition, is hatching a sex film.

He says the as yet untitled film will be a “a joyful porn movie – a joyful movie with explicit sex.” Noe’s regular backers Wild Bunch are again in the frame to handle it.

Noe promises that the new film will be very different in tone to his contribution to erotic portmanteau film Destricted (which he says was “really sad.”) The film will be made with unknown actors.

“I never saw a movie that mixed both real emotions and explicit sex,” Noe explained. “In life, [sex] is the focus of most people. They are not obsessed with money or social recognition. They are obsessed with sex. Why do we never see it portrayed for the joy it brings.”

The film, which the director is pitching as “a small family movie,” will be shot simply and with a small crew. Formally, Noe says, it will be the antithesis of the highly complex, effects-driven, Tokyo-shot Enter The Void. “Working in Japan with 60 people in the crew was a lot of fun but once you’ve had had a big, big party, you want to have a calm Sunday. I would say my erotic movie is going to be my Sunday.”