Noé is a filmmaker who came to international prominence at the turn of the millennium, riding a wave of aesthetically and narratively diverse French cinema that was nonetheless seen as unified by its extensive graphical treatment of sexuality, violence, or some combination of the two. From a wider vantage point, one that also considers the cinéma du look that preceded this film movement, as well as parallel movements in independent cinema in the U.S. and U.K., what has been alternately dubbed The New French Extreme or the cinéma du corps was nothing if not the latest development in the postmodern collision of traditionally separate spheres of arthouse and genre-exploitation movies. The brute address and sensational content of the latter was blended with the technical finesse and experimentation associated with the former, in order to bring about viscerally unique cinematic experiences. From a more pejorative perspective, though, the New French Extreme was a special low in both creative and ethical terms reached by the erasure of barriers between high and low culture, between substantive art and gratuitous trash. Their makers were angels to some, demons to others. Their works were at once liberating and transgressive statements of unalloyed vitality, as well as haunted totems to the total degeneration of values. At their most salient, these cases of new French extremity might be disassociated from the body of the cinéma du corps altogether, praised for evoking the prevalent anxiety, morbidity, and nihilism of contemporary life. At their most extreme, though, they were just as apt to be written off as soulless, mean-spirited ordeals, archetypical of the glib disaffection rampant in postmodernity. It was not simply their content, but the very pretense of their artistic approach, the clear obsession with the body, both in ecstasy and abjection, as merely a form to be posed and framed, that resulted in their alienating stylism. Their raison d'être was not merely to appease the most puerile and perverse fascinations, but specifically to goad and gaul the unsuspecting; to "put the audience through it," as its own form of vicarious amusement, smug cruelty for its own sadistic sake.
Even within this current, though, there was perhaps no other filmmaker like Gaspar Noé. He came to practically define not only the new French extreme, but also the very discourse around that film cycle and its polarizing effects. When his notorious rape-and-revenge shocker Irreversible sent droves of walkouts from its Cannes premiere in 2002, Noé made no secret of the fact that he relished the stir of controversy, and that he derived a certain pride and confirmation of his artistic prowess from his ability to alienate significant amounts of people with his movies. Whereas most of the new French extremists played their pretensions closer to their chests, content that they didn't get into filmmaking to make films for everybody, Noé gladly accepted his labeling as an agent provocateur and leveraged it as a conscious aspect of his brand. In teasing the production of his 2018 film Climax, for instance, he released a poster depicting himself, smiling like Mephistopheles, offering you a plastic cup of sangria, no doubt laced with something untoward. The poster read, "You Despised I Stand Alone - You Hated Irreversible - You Loathed Enter the Void - You Cursed Love - Now Try Climax!" It was a film advertisement targeted specifically and earnestly to people who didn't like his movies. And, then, when everybody loves his movies, or less and less people are walking out, he's liable to joke that he must be doing something wrong.
Suffice it to say, while it's not terribly abnormal for cinephiles to internalize their negative film experiences as personal slights against them by filmmakers, it is not enough to say that people merely hate Gaspar Noé's films. They come to deeply, viscerally hate the man.
Or maybe they don't. Narratives are powerful things, but in the wake of Noé's twenty-four years of filmmaking, seven feature films, and a good amount of side-hustle between short works, music videos, and contributions to several film anthologies, the infamy following him instantly shrinks the moment you see him. I had already seen him do a brief Q&A after a later showing of Vortex at the IFC, but it was while waiting for Lux Æterna at the Metrograph, seeing him just once, skittering downstairs to the theater, and then up again to the restaurant on the next floor, that I really feel like I got a full picture of a man, particularly his giddiness.
Noé's accent isn't heavy, but when he speaks English, you hear it spoken in a very French way. His words run together in a patter that isn't idiomatically familiar. He also speaks very softly. In fact, when he holds a microphone, he seems to speak more softly the closer he brings it to his lips. I had to lean in to hear him. And once I did that I suddenly got the distinct impression of a provocateur who was more guilelessly bemused than anything, not someone trying to spike my good time with a bad trip.
The movies played, and there were no walkouts. After the movies everyone moved out into the street, had a cigarette, and talked about what they had seen. By now, the people who go to Gaspar Noé movies are solidly prepared for what they're gonna get, which doesn't always mean they even enjoy his films. Mostly, we were all there for the same reason: to figure out what the Hell it is about Noé's cinema that is so hypnotic. Without the caricature of the sneering nihilist that one often gets from the embattled, impassioned reactions coming out of major film festivals - or, hang it all, from an image Noé cultivated himself - we were left processing our own befuddled attachment to following Noé's films, deeply impressed by his unique, stylish, and instinctual cinema, even if we didn't necessarily like, or care for, what it had to say.
And then, the final image to close that magical night at the Metrograph, set perfectly in a decaying urban corridor that wouldn't be out of place in one of Noé's own metropolitan horrors: A veritable parade following the director as he and his friends slithered off for a drink, Ari Aster allegedly among them. Luckily, the movie we had just finished was filled with religious ludicrosity, so I didn't feel too embarrassed comparing the procession to the following of Christ, and wondered if Noé wouldn't stumble into a Noé film of his own, fated to perform a special reenactment of the Passion's choreography.
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Lux Æterna came about as the result of Noé being approached by Anthony Vaccarello, a fashion designer and creative director for Saint Laurent. The film is the fourth in a series of art installations and motion-pictures produced and curated for Self, a project that seeks "to capture different aspects of the Saint Laurent personality," per the website. According to Noé, who introduced the film at the Metrograph, his technique for developing his films is typically improvisational, having only a general outline of what he wants and then working with his cast to pin down their characters, building a narrative around that collaboration. Even still, when promised complete creative freedom in exchange for the prerequisite showcase of Saint Laurent fashion, he took advantage of Vaccarello's offer without even having a real idea of what the film would be. At the last minute he pitched Vaccarello on something to do with witches, and a film-within-a-film. Vaccarello accepted the pitch, and the resulting film, running barely over 50 minutes, distills and magnifies the engrossing, frustrating, decadent, stylish, organized chaos of a Noé thriller. Whether the results "capture different aspects of the Saint Laurent personality," though, is a question I'll leave to the fashion people.
Noé's films are notorious for many reasons, but complex stories are not his signature. His movies tend to be organized around fairly straightforward ideas that are just as much aesthetic as narrative. In the case of Lux Æterna, the director took Vaccarello's commission and then turned to a rather routine formula, which is the film about the agony and ecstasy of a film production. You get the drama of maddening downtime, the technical hang-ups, the clashing personalities, and the miraculous artistic accidents. This is just the thing for Noé, who loves deleterious spectacles built around characters trapped in hopeless situations. And while this outline of cliches is dramatized with remarkable effectiveness, there's really no point in breaking down the threaded cork-board of Lux Æterna's characters and their intersections until one acknowledges how much the form of Noé's approach is constantly foregrounded. While complex stories and multi-dimensional characters might not be signatures of his work, his cinema proves particularly effective because of a sophisticated layering of cinematographic and editing devices that he tweaks and twists with each film.
Throughout the evolution of Noé's inimitable style, the idiom of his cinema has always vacillated nervously between poles of colorful bacchanal and an almost ascetic stagnancy. Even just between the productions of his 1991 featurette Carne and its full-length sequel I Stand Alone seven years later - both films following the masterful Philippe Nahon as a horse butcher with incestuous feelings for his daughter - the mechanics of Noé's aesthetic provocation of the spectator changed significantly. The latter is a much dryer film than the former. Eschewing the explicit slaughterhouse and childbirth scenes of Carne in favor of a rapid montage of stills that fast-forward through the events of the previous film, like flipping through a un-peopled photo album, the rest of I Stand Alone is largely composed of the hopeless Nahon framed in long-running wide shots, always on the move but never able to get his old body up to much speed, his thoughts ceaselessly grumbled in voice-over.
Both works established Noé's use of bold title cards that break the fourth wall between the film and the audience, an influence drawn just as much from the lost prose of silent cinema as it is from Jean-Luc Godard. The technique is on full display in Lux Æterna, with Noé quoting Godard himself, as well as Carl Theodore Dreyer and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, in service of what is both a film about the making of a film, as well as an evidently personal diary about filmmaking. And, yet, in Lux Æterna, his use of this technique is more of a return to long relaxed form than it is a part of a consistent pattern. Sure, the title sequences of Irreversible, Enter the Void, and Climax are all ravishing in their design, the latter two courtesy of Tom Kan, who has both designed the titles for Lux Æterna and plays a small role in the film as a behind-the-scenes cameraman. But Noé's use of titles, overall, has been a lot more traditional as of late, and they have consequently lacked a certain sense of hearing his own excitable voice in your head when you read them. That is, if one even can read them, given Noé's equal penchant for epileptic flickering and strobe effects in his titles, lighting, and color choices.
But perhaps it's Noé's camera itself, achieved since Irreversible with the consistent collaboration of Benoît Debie, that more aptly expresses the bipolar quality of his style. At the climax of I Stand Alone, Noé's camera is quite literally shocked off its normally static mount, and in the end floats out the window to take in what is, really, the only shot of the film to break out from its own icky claustrophobia, conveying the pastoral innocence (or ignorance) of the world beyond its subject. Having used his fourth wall-breaking titles to warn us that we had the opportunity to stop the film if we wanted to, I Stand Alone does indeed stand alone, the thread of its central narrative left off, the traumatized and lonely camera carried away in a listless nihilism. This ghostly camera returned with Irreversible, and Noé discovered that, with the ingenious application of video effects and editing, he could not only create a convincing illusion of the film playing out in a single unbroken take, but also allow the unmounted camera to assume a character complementary to its roll as a perceptive gaze locked in the squall of a nightmare. Though passing through walls and barriers just as the narrative of the film itself progresses backwards in time, scenes playing out in reverse chronology, Noé's camera also spins nauseatingly through the air, as if it is not so much desperately and willfully seeking out its subject as it is being flown along like a damned soul carried on the winds of a hellish torment. The first instinct of such a fluid camera seems to be its unbounded powers of observation, but Noé's films instead excite our sense of suffocation, disorientation, and dizziness. He further elaborated on this technique with Enter the Void, which is told entirely through the point-of-view of the protagonist, and, then, the protagonist's ghost.
What also happened with Enter the Void, though, was that, by experimenting with using special effects and editing to recreate the effect of "blinking" in a point-of-view shot, Noé then effectively re-discovered the poetry of more conventional editing. His subsequent erotic drama Love kept the "blinking" transitions, but utilized them outside of a point-of-view context, Noé shooting longer static shots again, and softening obvious jump cuts within a single-shot scene with just that hint of a black curtain falling. Then came Climax in 2018, and the mix and match of Noé's various graphic and editing tricks reached a new level of sophistication.
Now, with Lux Æterna, Noé and Debie liberally borrow from Brian Del Palma's use of split-screen to accentuate a whole new dimension of the handheld and unmounted camera's eerie effect of isolation and entrapment. The tortured ensemble cast closed into tighter frames, the spectator's attention is then divided in turn between two mystifyingly abstract windows. Combined with a still consistent use of long takes, we, once again, technically see more of the cinematic world, and more comprehensively, but our sense of space remains disoriented and surreal.
There will be those who look to Noé's much better-received Vortex and, contrasting it with Lux Æterna, falsely identify a radical departure in the director's style. This will be in part because the content of the film, while still effectively revolves around characters trapped in a downward spiral, is so much more restrained in terms of violence and vulgarity than any previous Noé film. But as Vortex reapplies the use of split-screen from Lux Æterna, the "blinking" jump cuts of Enter the Void and Love, and, most importantly, the sense of long-staring aimlessness from the static photography of I Stand Alone, it's clear that some critics have just been mistaking content for form, confusing Noé's gleeful inhabiting of the role of a grindhouse movie ringleader with a lack of earnestness regarding what he provokes us with, how he does it, and why. The implicit dismissal of Noé's style in favor of some discrete idea of substance belies a lack of appreciation for what he is actually doing. Yes, his stories are often one-note, the characters that he develops collaboratively almost always being shallow and vulgar themselves, with little diversity. But even as Noé affixes himself to what have effectively become archetypal movie formulas, he consistently embellishes them with an aesthetic enthusiasm that is, itself, wildly unpredictable. Between Vortex and Lux Æterna, it's hard to say which is the most Noé movie, because each of them is just a polar aspect of his artistic personality distilled. Unlike fellow stylists such as Wes Anderson or Nicolas Winding Refn, though, Noé's distillation of his cinema has not resulted in an exhausting sameness. By keeping the dramatic angle simple, and maybe leaning on the sensational a bit too indulgently, Noé is able to constantly elaborate on a familiar bag of tricks while, in the end, never really repeating himself.
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Again, I'm not qualified to determine if Lux Æterna captured any aspect of the Saint Laurent personality. Still, I feel confident about the oddness of association between Gaspar Noé's cinema and the cool exclusivity of high fashion. If anything, what charitably bridges Noé's cinematic vision with fashion is the shared fascination with looking, the choreography of spectacle through deceptively simple means, and the direction of the gaze.
Another director receiving uncommon praise this year for his latest film, except this time as a return to form that is, in fact, a more radical departure in his particular distillation of style, is Michael Bay. It was the irrepressible contrarian Armond White who, in his review of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, acknowledged that Bay had "never bothered filming a good script," but nonetheless praised his exuberantly communicated, "sheer fascination with seeing" - seeing not just cars and girls, not just architecture and destruction, but also the way the camera can mold the vulgar and superficial subject into a captivating form that, quite the contrary of the "style-over-substance" critique, is brimming with surreal and symbolic implications. The slick commerciality of how he lights, frames, and moves a series of shots, comprehensively exploring the mise en scène while never reaching a sense of grounded, psychological realism, then juxtaposed with the crass and vile product that this commercial reality exists to sell, creates a brute address that then enfolds and comments upon itself. This exuberance of form, which exists solely the maximize the fascination and ecstasy of seeing, seems to uniquely illuminate the embedded, fetishistic significance of the subject.
I feel much the same way about Noé's cinema and its own style, which is much more boundary-pushing than Bay's, though not necessarily any less slick or commercial. For whatever their perceived shallowness of character and storytelling, Noé's films seem spurred by the intense fascination of seeing, in a way where boundaries between form and narrative are collapsed. Between the split screens of Lux Æterna, there are sometimes only different aspects of the same pervasive chaos being filmed by Noé or Debie or even Tom Kan. At other times, loose threads of competing stories are pit against each other for our attention. In this divided context, the form of Lux Æterna, overall, creates its own narrative, appeasing the abstracted perspectives of the story in a unified formal sequence that takes the rather straightforward tale and renders it wholly unique via the conflict of details between competing shots, overlapping soundtracks, and a cinematic frame that is subject to violent change with the "blink" of one of Noé and editor Jerome Pesnel's cuts. Noé is a master of this kind of filmmaking, in which the narrative does not so much unfurl from a consistent or focal perspective, as it does tremor and then erupt noisily from the sheer ambience of mounting chaos and conflict itself.
Despite it all, and at the heart of everything, or at least most frequently returning to the center of Noé's organized confusion, are Béatrice Dalle and Charlotte Gainsbourg, headlining an ensemble cast largely portraying fictionalized or embellished versions of themselves. With her own reputation for controversy and provocation preceding her, Dalle inhabits the part of an experienced actress and model who has found herself producing a strange avant-garde feature that might indeed be a piece of Saint Laurent's Self within Self. In the hour that Lux Æterna covers, the dysfunctional production builds up to an apparently climactic set piece that will take Gainsbourg (formerly the face of Saint Laurent's FW17 campaign), as well as Abbey Lee and Mica Argañaraz, and pose them in contemporary-fashion as witches about to be burned at the stake by a black-clad mob of men. In the meantime, though, the temperamental Béatrice grows increasingly paranoid and belligerent, anticipating her fellow producers' and director Luka Isaac's not-so secret efforts to catch her in a compromising position and get her thrown off her own project. Out of the disorder and disarray, various character threads are taken up and then left alone, most of them satirizing some aspect of the film industry and its personalities. But there's a distinctive turn in mood that occurs very late in the program, when Charlotte is just about to go on set, and she receives a distressing phone call from her daughter, seeming to suggest that a boy at school may have molested and injured her intimately. Pulled in all directions, she is tied to the stake, and what at first seems to be a simple technical malfunction takes on diabolical significance, Charlotte sent into a kind of epileptic trance, Luka insisting on keeping the shot even as his actresses suffer, and Béatrice falling apart as her vision is rested from her.
Those of us at the Metrograph preview got a certification of Noé's collaborative approach to character and storytelling with his actors. Introducing the film, Noé at one point mentioned that he was an atheist, but that he was nonetheless amused by how he often finds himself earnestly invoking and making bargains with God, a sentiment that is shared by Béatrice in a long opening conversation she has with a polite but rather awkward Charlotte, the two sat close together but more deeply separated by the border of the split screen. Not breaking its director's track record with anything approaching subtlety, Lux Æterna, in addition to being a film about both the magic and madness of filmmaking, reveals itself through Noé's organic and improvisational style to have at least something to say about spirituality on one hand and patriarchy on the other. The overall narrative of the film, involving Béatrice as a kind of maligned, washed-up diva fighting for creative control, with references to her own nostalgic memories of playing witches being burned at the stake in other films, and thus passing the torch to the relatively virginal Charlotte, of course concludes with the false mob, aligned with Luka's camera, assuming the position of an earnest, persecutory frenzy, the arrangement of Charlotte, Abbey, and Mica at their stakes obviously evoking the Passion of the Christ. And just in case that visual allusion is a bit too indirect, Noé foreshadows it by having the atheistic Béatrice commenting upon the fascination of seeing religious iconography, the strange morbid beauty of the Passion and what she calls its "choreography." With film, fashion, and spectacle at the spiritual center of a fallen world, here are the actresses and models paraded and sacrificed for the sins of men, and on the very eve of one of their prickly elders attempting in vain to assert some kind of equality of control behind the camera, rather than simply repeating the objectification and molestation before it.
The elliptical framing of the film starts with the shameless use of stock footage cribbed from Benjamin Christensen's Häxan and Dreyer's Day of Wrath, Noé both paying homage to his classic film influences while also situating his own piece within a tradition of films dealing with the trauma, and morbid interest left in modern secular societies by legacies of religious fundamentalism and violence, particularly as it is inflicted on women as the favored object of persecution. The difference is that the perspective of Noé's essayed influences is definitively modern and rational in its outlook, Häxan in particular attempting to survey the various diagnoses that explain the supposed mania of witch trials. Lux Æterna, on the other hand, inherits the postmodernist's lack of confidence in grand narratives of rationality, humanism, and civilizational progress, depicting a scenario in which the line between an impressionistic rendering of the characters' own unraveling psyches and a genuine experience of infernal magic and possession at the climax of the film is left unresolved. Is this a technical glitch, or has the black Passion of this film production actually conjured something occult? The credits themselves end with another of Noé's fourth wall-breaking titles, this time thanking God for making him an atheist. Though a rather weak quip, this nonetheless gets at something earnest, which is how non-belief becomes a kind of veil of security for those who do not want to believe what their own fascination with seeing reveals to them. Embedded in the maximizing form of Lux Æterna is a nonetheless subtle narrative about the secular, profane world of modernity suddenly being overcome with a spiritual awe that, far from offering solace, portends horrifying implications of forces beyong our control and comprehension.
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One could forgivably dismiss the potential for earnestness in Noé's feminism, especially considering the rather regressive and binary gender dynamics he posits in most of his films, particularly Irreversible. One might also dismiss the bastardized spirituality reflected in Lux Æterna and Enter the Void as simply a man who parties too hard and has taken too many drugs mistaking the mere sensual hypnosis of psychedelia for a true, meditative, overcoming spiritual experience. Who knows, you could also just disregard Lux Æterna as merely an elaborate and pretentious advertisement, the most cynical kind of filmmaking incarnate with the infernal brand of Saint Laurent itself. But whatever reservations seem to polarize the reactions to Lux Æterna just don't seem to apply to Vortex. And while it's all well and good for me to grind my axe against the persistent lack of appreciation for Noé's style, perhaps the only thing to say is that the opportunity to view Lux Æterna and Vortex side-by-side, or to make a definitive decision to see one and not the other, says all that there needs to be said about why he is a master cinematic formalist, and why, for some, the latter drama might be the superior vehicle for settling that notion.
His first straight drama since Love, Noé's true latest feature - two-and-a-half times as long as Lux Æterna - stars one of his idols, the director Dario Argento, and actress Françoise Lebrun as a married couple at the sunset of their years. The former is a film critic with heart problems in the process of writing his final book on the relationship between cinema and dreams. The latter is a psychiatrist suffering from dementia. Between this declining pair, Argento's husband increasingly isolating himself from the trauma of old age, even at the expense of the woman he once truly loved but now only pities, the split-screen technique and long-running camera takes, sometimes static, sometimes handheld, applies the same sense of surreal disorientation to the much more grounded environment of an apartment entombed by the books, journals, records, movies, and knick-knacks accumulated by decades of solipsistic nesting. Though the respective offices of husband and wife are only down the hall from one another, in the relative terms of Noé's masterful communication of claustrophobia, restricted space, and aimless pacing of old age, they might as well exist in parallel dimensions. In one particularly evocative use of the split-screen, as Dario reaches across a table in order to take Françoise's hand, attempting in vain to soothe her distress, the nature of not only the separation of the Noé and Debie's cameras operating simultaneously, but also the distortion created by placing two separate, wide-angle lenses right next to each other, unnaturally extends and bends Dario's arm in such a way as to emphasize the desperate, partially disingenuous futility of the gesture.
There is a way to argue that it offers more personal storytelling from Noé than we are used to. But this hinges upon taking for granted that the filmmaker's own experiences with a mother suffering from dementia, or his own confrontation with mortality after suffering a nearly fatal brain hemorrhage in 2020, are somehow more personal and autobiographical than his fascination with seeing and his spiritual reverence for cinema overall. In all the praise circulating Vortex, it is not so much important that audiences equally appreciate Lux Æterna, or Climax, or Enter the Void, or whatever. Again, your auteur has given you permission to hate him. The hate, the choreographed passion of a persecution for perceived infernal infractions against all that is holy, is part of the art. What is important is that, at the end of the road, Vortex stands alone and is appreciated as another exceptional demonstration of Noé's incredible capacity for maintaining an artistic signature that nonetheless continues to articulate itself in radically new ways. Because the only difference with Vortex is that Noé's style has finally manifested in a way that, for most established film critics, anyway, its elegance and subtlety in formally describing relatively simple stories can no longer be ignored. Its muted content will no doubt complement his fascination with seeing in a more accessible way.
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