Taking its cues from the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thodol) Noe’s latest film is the ultimate death trip. The film mostly follows the main protagonist Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) after he has died, shot by police in the bathroom of a club, as he floats over the city of Tokyo trapped between the life he has left behind and a symbolic rebirth.
The film begins with a series of POV scenes through Oscar’s eyes, the cuts hidden in Oscar’s blinking. The audience experiences the scenes as Oscar as he argues with his sister, take drugs, discusses the Tibetan Book of the Dead with his friend Victor and ultimately meet a friend for a drug deal that leads to his death. As Oscar lies in the toilet dying, he leaves his body and the POV camera follows. For the rest of the film we see most of the scenes slightly from above as Oscar floats around Tokyo viewing the lives of his friends unravel and the problems his wayward sister, Linda (Paz De La Huerta), faces. The camerawork as Oscar floats over the scenes and flies rapidly across Tokyo are dizzying and the constant sweeping and swaying POV camera adds to the disorientation that an audience feels watching Enter The Void. The narrative of the film loosely follows the three stages of the Tibetan Book of the dead, which are described by Victor as he and Oscar walk towards the club. Although the film is a startling and and intense experience in the first half hour, seeing through Oscar’s eyes as he takes DMT (a drug believed to create a near-death like state), it is once he dies that the film becomes a crazy trip that left me feeling like I wanted to see more but at the same time desperate for it to end.
Noe originally wrote a short synopsis for this film when he was twenty and this does show, with the film’s focus on the narcissistic, drug addled immature characters who wander Tokyo looking for fun. It was when watching Lady in the Lake on Television after taking ‘magic mushrooms’ that he came up with the particular style he wanted to employ. Lady in the Lake was a 1947 MGM film noir, filmed entirely in POV from the viewpoint of the central character, Philip Marlowe. Noe uses this concept under extreme conditions giving us the viewpoint of a dead man and constantly cutting to throbbing lights and CGI hallucinogenic imagery, inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey. He has stated that this was the film that he always wanted to make and that Irreversible was actually a trial run for a lot of the techniques employed here and to him also represented a way of raising the funds to make Enter The Void. There is definitely a clear trajectory between Irreversible and Enter The Void both thematically and visually.
After Oscar has died he first drifts around Tokyo, seeing his sister having sex and even going inside the mind of the man she is having sex with, the POV switching so that on some level at least Oscar is having sex with his own sister. He then experiences his life again, not flashing before his eyes but slowly unfolding through a series of dreamy and nightmarish scenes shown to the audience not through a strict POV but filmed just over Oscar’s shoulder, as if we are eavesdropping. Perhaps the most significant event seen in his life is the car crash witnessed by Oscar and Linda that kills both of their parents and leads to the children being split up. The car crash is a viscerally shocking scene as the impact flies at the screen and the resulting shock is made worse by the long shots of a young Linda screaming. Oscar promises his sister that they will not be split up and when they are he does everything possible to bring them back together. After raising the money to fly her to Tokyo, borrowing it from his friend’s mother who he is sleeping with, the two are reunited. It becomes obvious at this point that the pair have a strangely sexual relationship with Linda even trying to kiss Oscar. This is of course added to by the scenes we see before this and after where Oscar drifts into the men having sex with his sister and, in the final shots of the film, even inside her vagina looking out as the penis of his friend Victor moves in and out. This scene is particularly unpleasant for a viewer in a cinema and made even worse by the climax to the scene, pun intended, which provoked laughter from a lot of the audience in the screening I attended.
The combination of the relationship between the siblings and Oscar’s very obvious Freudian impulses, the symbolism overplayed in places, are made even more uncomfortable with the knowledge that Gaspar Noe was involved in a car accident as a child, although his parents survived, and has a close relationship with his only other sibling, his sister. As with Noe’s other films, sex is prominent and is not always pleasant but at the same time treated with a sense of reverence. In one of the final scenes, a far too lengthy section set in a Love Hotel where all the characters are engaging in sexual activities, there is a strange glowing light that covers the sexual areas of the participants.
Although Noe stated in a Q&A after the film that he does not believe in re-incarnation or spirits leaving their bodies he uses this as device for creating a twisted trip rather than an exploration of the point of death. Enter The Void is often rambling, occasionally disturbing and always intense. In making Enter The Void, Noe has made a film unlike any other and his originality and inventiveness is undeniable. The film truly is a trip from beginning to end. Throughout it is hallucinatory, funny, boring, exciting, exhausting and terrifying and like a drug induced trip the film will leave you wanting to tell others all about it but unsure if you want to experience the intensity of it again.
**This review originally appeared on my personal blog following the film’s screening at the 2009 London Film Festival. It is therefore a review of the cut that showed there which may differ from what is shown in UK cinemas**
