FILM

After the grinding horror and temporal distortion of ‘Irreversible’ French enfant terrible director Gaspar Noe is messing with our heads again with the splendidly controversial ‘Enter the Void’. Venue reports.

The publicists call it ‘the ultimate head-trip’ and ‘a work of Pure Cinema’. The director prefers the phrase ‘psychedelic melodrama’. Yep, Gaspar Noe is back with a follow-up to his hugely controversial 2002 rape’n’murder flick ‘Irreversible’, which was told in reverse to underline Noe’s fatalistic message: “Time destroys all things”. Now the French provocateur sets out to push the film-making boundaries further with ‘Enter the Void’, which immerses us in the inner consciousness of its protagonist, whose face we never see. It’s the story of Oscar, a small time drug dealer, who moves to Tokyo with his stripper sister Linda, and is shot dead during a police bust. As he lies dying, he remembers his pledge never to abandon Linda and refuses to leave the land of the living, his spirit floating over Tokyo’s nightscape of strip bars, clubs and seedy hangouts.

How the hell do you come up with such an idea? “I grew up with an atheist education, but towards the end of adolescence, when you start smoking joints, you also start asking yourself questions about death and the existence of an eventual afterworld,” explains Noe. “Even though I’ve never participated in any religious faith, I started to get interested in books to do with reincarnation, ‘Life after Death’ by Raymond Moody in particular, and I had this whole crazy idea of what could happen to me when I die. Later, when I was around 23, I watched ‘Lady in the Lake’ [Robert Montgomery’s 1947 Chandler adaptation] on mushrooms. It’s a film shot entirely from the point of view of the main character and, under the effect of the psilocybin, I was transported into the TV and into [Philip] Marlowe’s head, even though the film was in black and white and subtitled. I thought that the technique of filming through the eyes of a character was the most beautiful cinematographic artifice there could be and that the day I made a film about the afterworld, I would film through the subjective vision of the character. So this is an idea I’ve had for a while. I’ve written it over the past fifteen years and I couldn’t even tell you how many drafts I’ve done. The first were much more narrative and linear, while the later drafts were much more abstract and euphoric. ‘Irreversible’ was kind of a trial run for this project, where I tested ideas with flying cameras and long takes.”

Among his inspirations was that old hippy favourite, the Tibetan Book of the Dead. “In the description of the afterworld in ‘The Tibetan Book of the Dead’, there is definitely a voyage, a process with several stages that leads up to the final stage: reincarnation. But inside, the visions and the nightmares that are supposed to reveal the psyche, or past life, of the dying individual, aren’t described. The book is very abstract, very colourful and very poetic. This parallel world, where the spirit, which has now left the body, floats for a long time, is described as a reality as illusory as the world of the living. Lots of people have been inspired to write fiction by this book - in particular Philip K. Dick - but it was also used to guide people through collective LSD-induced psychedelic voyages, as Timothy Leary did in the 70s. While the book is a religious text, it quickly became a beacon for the hippies I so admired as a kid.”

Oscar might be seen as something of a loser, and therefore difficult for audiences to identify with. Noe takes issue with such assumptions. “He’s not a total loser. He’s actually kind of a winner up until he loses control of his dick and, by fucking his friend’s mother, ends up being turned in to the cops. For most people I know, the principal drive in life isn’t drugs at all, it’s sex. Selling drugs is more of a way of attracting affection. He’s just a young crazy dog who’s doing his best to be happy in life. And I think this is something that is universal to us all.”

A recurring dramatic device in Noe’s work seems to be that of the abrupt, life-changing incident. In ‘Carne’, it’s a misunderstanding that leads to a stabbing; in ‘Irréversible’ an anonymous rape at the turn of a corner. ‘Enter the Void’ is kick-started by the death of Oscar and Linda’s parents in a horrible car accident. “The fear of losing one’s parents is the ultimate fear of every child and, in fact, it’s a dramatic device that anyone should be able to identify with. When I was very young, I had a taxi accident, which, while almost benign in comparison, is still engraved in my memory. But the real dramatic device in this film is the blood bond between the two children, with this impossible promise they’ve made of mutually protecting one another, even after death.”

‘Enter the Void’ opened on Fri 24 Sept.
  

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