When I saw Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible in 2002 I was floored. After spending an hour and half in a dark basement watching people being raped and having their heads smashed in by fire extinguishers, my friend Andy Capper and I left the screening room a little shellshocked. The switch from Noé’s Parisian hell to Soho’s afternoon sun was disorientating, and we talked about how the film had affected us. It was energising. Irréversible is a 90 minute rush of adrenaline, as powerful as cinema gets, despite the fact that it was conceived, set up, shot and completed within weeks. By way of contrast Enter The Void, a story Noé has wanted to tell since the early 90s, took five years to make, utilises an extreme amount of effects, and does lots of things I’ve never seen before. It’s easily the most visceral cinematic experience I’ve ever had.
For hours after I saw it my head was pulsating with the film’s Day-Glo images, strobe lights and droning sounds. I’d heard that Noé wanted to portray an out of body experience, and when I spoke to him in January, he talked about how much he enjoyed Avatar in 3D. Clearly he’s determined to push cinema to its limits, on every level. “With Irréversible, and some of Enter The Void,” he told me, “both movies are supposed to recreate some sort of altered sensibility or state of consciousness, using cinematic weapons, sound, image, editing, whatever you can use to make it work.”
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Amazingly, he’s really made it work. He has a minor obsession with Kubrick’s 2001 – a poster for that film, selling it as “the ultimate trip”, is right there in Irréversible, in Vincent Cassel and Monica Bellucci’s apartment, but that claim is now Enter The Void’s to make. This is a 135 minute trip, structurally inspired by The Tibetan Book Of The Dead, and aesthetically inspired by not only by 2001‘s Star Gate sequence, but by Tron, Blade Runner, and Altered States. His own work has informed this as well; Noé’s said that Irréversible, with its twirling cameras and long takes, was in some ways a trial run for this, and there’s a lot of that here: For the majority of the film we see through the eyes of junkie Oscar’s disembodied, drugged, and dead spirit as it flies through, and over, the city (a neon Tokyo which looks like it’s been puked on by the Las Vegas Strip).
As early as the opening credits, which practically jump out of the screen and punch you in the face, it’s clear that this is about a lot more than just plot (a family melodrama, essentially), Noé wants us to submit to the film and get lost in it, to feel it. Hallucinogenic scenes with psychedelics play out in real time. Violent scenes are brutally shocking. Sex scenes are graphic and enhanced by gorgeous CG effects. I can’t wait to see it again.
Some amazing people have brought this story to life – Marc Caro, co-director of Delicatessen and City Of The Lost Children is the film’s art supervisor. The effects are by Pierre Buffin and his company Buf, who worked on Fight Club, the Matrix series, and Avatar, while the hypnotic soundtrack is courtesy of Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter. But above all, this is a film that could only have been made by Noé.
Charlie Kaufman says that film, as a medium, is dead – unlike theatre. It’s locked, it’s done, you can’t interact with it. But he hasn’t seen this. Enter The Void feels very, very alive and, in terms of pure cinematic experience, is revolutionary. It’s out in UK cinemas 24 September. Do yourself a favour and see it on a big screen. We’ll be bringing you more from Noé before then, including a new interview and a documentary we made on the Enter The Void set, for The Vice Guide To Film.
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