If asked whether cinema is a visceral experience or a narrative medium, ideally I would answer "both," but one answer is as good as the other. Enter the Void is, not surprisingly, a cathartic visceral experience, which should be expected from a visually uncompromising filmmaker like Gaspar Noé, who eight years ago spurred disturbed discussions with his film Irreversible.
Perfecting the techniques he first made use on that film, while expanding the limits of what he dares to show on camera, Noé delivers a standard-bending film about life, death and what comes after; although his vision of the afterlife is occupied with his primal obsessions in this life: sex, drugs and strobe lights.
Supposedly based loosely on the Tibetan Book of the Dead (although it's more like it references said book as a mean to explain itself), Enter the Void dons the gimmick of a first-person perspective. The role of Oscar, a teenage drug dealing American living the low-high life in neon-raped Tokyo, is represented in body and voice by first-timer Nathaniel Brown, but is really played by the audience. Not only because the film is exclusively shot in POV and behind-the-head shots, but also because the character is meant to be an avatar of the human experience. Throughout the film, Oscar is often just observing, listening or reacting to the secondary characters (so tempting to call them NPCs). Rarely does he actively insert himself, because he's mostly a vessel, not a fully realized character.
There's something strange and provocative about this, because Oscar is a walking bad judgment, yet we are supposed to relate to—nay, inhabit—him. Oscar is Gaspar Noé's idea of the everyman, which says more about Noé than it does about humanity, but take away the excess of Oscar doing these things continuously for the whole period of the film, and it is a rather ordinary portrait of the restless (or aimless) youth. He's not a bad kid, but he gets high a lot, spends most of his time clubbing, and is obsessed with sex. Typical, right? Portions of this movie, when not looking like 2001's Jupiter segment, resembles Prodigy's infamous "Smack My Bitch Up" video, with shades of Linklater's Waking Life.
There's a lot of gibberish, sure. It purports to be a spiritual journey, and literally such: during a drug deal gone wrong in a club called The Void, the Japanese police corner Oscar into the bathroom and shoot him dead, thinking he's armed. We then assume the POV of Oscar's ghost, witnessing the aftermath of his own death, mostly peeping on his own sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta). In the middle portion of the film, we see scenes from his childhood and of recent events, which as per Noe's vision of pervasive memories, is full of lusty pursuits and bloody ends. The glibness of it, on the whole, doesn't say anything too percipient, but it has glimpses of filth in everyday life that are individually arresting. It reminds me of the Christian haunted houses featured in the documentary Hell House—sans judgment, of course.
For a film nearly three hours in length and consists of a lot of floating around dingy spaces, I was absolutely riveted by it. It's Noé's technical mastery that guides the film, from his handling of the glide cam that acts as Oscar's ghost (a technique he experimented with in Irreversible and perfected here) to his command of audio/visual editing as an assault weapon. It's simultaneously beautiful to look at and a challenge to endure.
It's undeniably irresistible and mesmerizing. From the sensory assault opening credits (which you can sample for yourself here) to the ludicrously over-the-top but thematically outrageous final sequence that opens up all sorts of incestuous readings, the film feels inescapable. The number of people I noticed walking out of my screening obviously puts that word to the test, but I can't understand how they did it. The patterned images, the smooth camerawork, the lullaby narration, the smash-grab editing—they all merge into an invisible force that lift you up onto a gentle and amusing, yet at the same time obnoxious and horrifying carnival ride.
Enter the Void is a ride that ruffled me, intrigued me and addicted me. I want to go on it again and again, but perhaps best not, for the sake of maintaining lucidity. It's like a drug high. I'm pretty sure had the movie went on for 3, 6 or 20 more hours, I wouldn't have noticed.
"Enter the Void" opens September 24, 2010 and is not rated. Drama, Thriller. Directed by Gaspar Noé. Written by Lucile Hadzihalilovic, Gaspar Noé. Starring Cyril Roy, Nathaniel Brown, Paz De La Huerta.
