Enter The Void
An amateurish mess of a film from a talented and provocative filmmaker - a crushing disappointment.
Gaspar Noé follows up his emotionally polarising but brilliant Irreversible with a film even more difficult to watch. There's no lingering, horrifically real rape to endure this time, but a hallucinatory path through barely disguised homophobia and misogyny.
The director utilises the complex, swooping camera shots glimpses at in his last work to bring us an admittedly breathtaking and visionary film, which is let down by an almost juvenile view of love and religion, and the worst acting I've ever seen in a major production.
Opening with the greatest opening credits I have ever seen (the sensory overload gives the film an extra star by itself and is worth the admission alone), it's rapidly downhill from then on. The entire film is literally seen through our leading man's eyes, Oscar (Nathaniel Brown, of whom we only see glimpses and the odd drug-addled voice over). Drifting in Tokyo, this American ekes out a living as a drug dealer, and we see repeated flashbacks of his childhood, including the devastatingly powerful car crash that orphans him and his sister; the siblings are separated in foster care, but reunite in adulthood. Linda (a laughably bad Paz de la Huerta, visibly struggling with improvised dialogue) comes over to visit her brother, and before you know it, she's a stripper and having a joyless affair with a shady local.
Before the key moment occurs that dramatically shifts the tone of the film, Oscar's buddy helpfully appears to have a long-winded chat about the Tibetan Book of the Dead in great detail. With that account of death and rebirth nicely planted in our heads, poor Oscar is shot dead during a police drugs raid, the camera rises through the body and we now float through Tokyo's neon streets (filmed like nothing you've seen before) and observe Linda from Oscar's purgatory POV. If Noé had trimmed an hour from this 150 minute indulgence, I'd be reviewing an entirely different film. Instead, for what seems like four hours, we drift through hallucinations and flashbacks that become repetitive to the point of frustration, with the odd graphic scene of sex and abortion to shock the viewer awake.
Noé's blinkered view of sex is grating. He appears to only associate it with reproduction, and if there were accusations of homophobia in Irreversible, in Enter The Void, his prejudice is beyond doubt. Once again, the most reprehensible character is homosexual (his actions are even implied as being exceptionally seedy by our morally bankrupt heroes), and redemption in this film can only be found in a shocking and faintly ridiculous final orgy of pornographically explicit (and heterosexual) sex.
Praise must be given for Noé's grand ambition in picturing transcendence. Enter The Void attempts to make the ugliness of life beautiful, but remove those thrillingly shot aerial views of a minature city that blend in and out of reality as we know it, and you're left with two and a half hours of soul-sucking emptiness. Whether Oscar is suffering from a final chemical trip before brain death or a real afterlife is irrelevant, as you just won't care. It's worth noting than several different edits of the film have been screened worldwide - we're talking a good 20 minutes difference in runtimes between them. Even Noé has no clear vision of what this film is. An amateurish mess of a film from a talented and provocative filmmaker and a crushing disappointment.
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