For my public event, I attended a screening of Gaspar Noe’s latest film, “Enter the Void” (2010), which was playing at the Landmark Theater in Los Angeles for a limited run. Although I have already briefly touched upon the film in a previous blog post, I feel compelled to come back to it with a more critical eye, particularly due to the fact that it is simply so completely different from every other European film I have seen in the past few months.
The film can be described as a an exploration of the interwoven themes of life, love, death and rebirth. These themes are delved into by following the protagonist, Oscar, a drug-dealing addict, through his present, past, and after-life. This all takes place mostly in Tokyo, and centers around his relationship with his sister and their parent’s death. Of course, this description barely scratches the surface of the intensely original audio-visual experience that Gaspar Noe has crafted, a film that is hard to categorize and even harder to contextualize.
Indeed, the film tends to defy useful comparison and contextual analysis with most other relevant European films today. Gaspar Noe, the “bad-boy auteur of French cinema” is known for making films that straddle the line between avant-garde art and narrative filmmaking. From the seizure-inducing, blindingly-cool and absurd opening credits, you know immediately that “Enter the Void” is going to be an unusual cinematic experience. It does not lend itself to obvious social, national or political analysis. The film is a bizarre hallucinatory sense-straining trip into a hellish neon nightmare-land, with little immediate connection to the real world. Somehow we end up emerging after nearly 3 hours, imbued with a feeling of rebirth, and a sense of love conquering death, but most of the audience is unsure of how they even came to that conclusion. At least the audience remaining that hasn’t already left the theater mid-film, overwhelmed or confused.
So, how do we place this film amongst the rest of European cinema? Do we chock it up to a bizarre random art film, an anomaly free of the implications of all that we’ve learnt this semester? Not so fast, if you really dig deeply, and look at the overall format and makeup of the film, some interesting thoughts emerge. First and foremost, Enter the Void is a film directed by an Argentinian-born French director, which takes place in Tokyo, and is populated with American, Japanese and French actors, all speaking in different languages. The film is the furthest thing from a national film – the content has nearly nothing to do with its location, which serves only as a provocative backdrop to explore the film’s themes. The film is, I think, a universal film, or to put it in other words, an example of global or world media. The story is meant to appeal (or at least be freely examined) by people of all nations, and the film bares little attachment to any national culture or context, French, American or Japanese. It is a film about people, about travelers, about the outcasts of any society. One could argue that any country could have made the film, although it certainly fits best within the European sphere, if only for its very liberal displays of nudity, sex, violence and drug use, which would be unthinkable in a U.S. film. In fact, the film is unrated. Furthermore, while I think the film will be greatly enjoyed by American audiences who appreciate art film, the film also maintains an intense European identity due to its complete and utter rejection of classical Hollywood filmmaking aesthetics. Can you imagine an American film in which the main character’s face is only glimpsed two times, and just for a few seconds? While one could say the film is marketed very narrowly (if it’s trying to market itself at all…) towards a niche art-film appreciating audience, it is also targeting a broad an international range of such film-lovers. This is made further obvious because it has to be one of the most expensive experimental narratives ever made, with a budget around $23 million. Even if you are not an arthouse fan, the broadly appealing and visually seductive graphic effects make it a globally attractive film. Anyone who appreciates this sort of auteur, experimental arthouse filmmaking can enjoy and relate to this film regardless of their nationality, gender, race and socioeconomic class.
Here is a link to the opening credits – they get more and more about 1 minute in, and then transitions into the film:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLlLH6xDTD8
And here is the official trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKRxDP--e-Y
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