Even those who have not seen Gasper Noé’s second film,
Irreversible, know all about its long (nearly 10 minutes) and shocking rape scene. They also know about the terrible beating that happens in the gay nightclub (the Rectum). One man smashes the face of another man with a fire extinguisher—metal, bone, metal, bone, blood, metal, more blood, more bone. Eventually the man dies. Eventually we learn the reason why he was brutally murdered. Eventually we learn he was mistaken for a rapist. The film moves in the opposite direction of time’s arrow. Because we’re moving backward, we learn of the mistaken identity during the long rape scene. It’s impossible to forget the face of the actual rapist (he has an ugly nose), which we see long before he commits the crime. While the innocent man is being killed by the rape victim’s enraged boyfriend (fire extinguisher, flesh, fire extinguisher, bone), we see the criminal. He is watching the beating and laughing to himself. His ugly nose makes his self-satisfaction all the more monstrous. The only murder in the film happens in the Rectum.
Noé’s first film is called I Stand Alone; Irreversible could have been called I Have One Big Message. The one thing the French/Argentine director wants you to understand is that human law is always social, always involves the public. Human law is not something that a single person (or a family) can take into his/her hands. No matter how brutal the crime, no matter how certain you are of being right, you must not be the judge. Only the public has the right and power to judge a suspect. The one big message in Irreversible is indeed the one big message we find in the ancient Greek plays by Aeschylus: the Oresteia trilogy.
There’s always something classical at the core of Noé’s fancy, flashy, super-trippy work—classic Greek drama or classical music. The central classical piece in Irreversible is Beethoven’s epic Symphony no. 7 in A Major, op. 92. In Enter the Void, his latest (and least successful but most spectacular) film, it’s Bach’s beautiful ode to flying (it was written 200 years before the invention of flying machines) “Air on the G String” (my interpretation of the piece, an “ode to flying,” might be completely wrong, but the piece has been used to advertise some airlines). The classical drama that’s referenced in Enter the Void is, of course, Antigone. Now for some clarification—there are two popular readings of this play: One sees the confrontation between Antigone and King Creon as a confrontation between the laws of the family and the laws of the state. Antigone wants to bury Polynices, her brother (that is the law of the family); the state sees Polynices as a criminal and demands that his body rot in the sun as punishment (that is the law of the state).
The other reading of the play was made famous by the German philosopher Hegel. In Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807), he sees the cause of the confrontation between An-tigone and King Creon as being the naturally deep love that a sister and brother have for each other. Antigone has to bury her brother because she has so much (too much) love for him. For Hegel, the highest love possible between two people is not between a husband and a wife or a mother and a child, but between a brother and a sister. This is the stuff of Enter the Void. The brother (Nathaniel Brown) is a drug dealer; the sister (Paz de la Huerta) is a stripper. They lost their parents as children; they lived in foster homes; they recently moved to Tokyo, which Noé imagines as the most urban city in the world. No trees, hills, or animals—it’s a neon purity of human beings, streets, and buildings.
After having a long psychedelic trip (à la the end of Kubrick’s 2001), the brother meets a client in a club called the Void, finds himself in a sting operation, runs to a bathroom to dump his pills, gets shot in the back, and slowly dies. The screen goes white for two whole minutes. Then we return to the world of things and people as his ghost. The ghost floats over the Void, over the streets, flies across town, and enters his sister’s strip club. She is in a dressing room. She is with her boss. The boss pulls out his cock, and they begin fucking on a couch. After floating above the couch for a moment, the ghost passes through the back of the boss’s head and enters his mind. The brother sees what the boss sees: his sister, her moaning mouth, her swirling nipples. The brother is fucking the sister. Enter the Void.
The film, which also travels through the drug dealer’s past, comes very close to the feel and look of Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire. But there are no angels over Tokyo; it’s just the ghost of a careless and rather daft drug dealer. The end of the film is very shocking. I will say nothing about it. Nothing. Rien, rien, rien! 
Enter the Void plays Oct 7–14 at Northwest Film Forum.
Oh god. Bleh. What a great date movie. Very uplifting.
This is a terrible review of a the film.HEAVE. It’s like he just wanted to talk about his knowledge of plays and classical music and philosophy and whatever else he farts over at night. BARF. Review the movie at hand DUDE, and not just by dryly recounting what happens- as he does in the fifth paragraph. BIG FART NOIZE! I hate it when reviewers do this. I’m always bummed when a movie I’m interested in is reviewed by Charles Mudede.
ZZZomp, this is really one of his better reviews. He actually describes parts of the movie a couple of times instead of just rambling about two or three obscure plays/novels that are completely unrelated to the film or discussing how many beautiful women he has slept with. Charles Mudede’s textual masturbation is quite pathetic and generally uninformative unless you happen to be Charles Mudede. It’s stupefying to me that The Stranger keeps allowing him to write reviews that the vast majority of readers are not going to be able to identify with. At least Everett True had an expiration date (as well as some great insight and strong opinions), but Charles Mudede seems to be here for the long haul.
I like the review. It is allusive, smart without being smart-assed, and human. There’s room in the world for the didactic and the circular. Relax.
I agree with ZZZomp, Mudede sucks. His reviews are always so fucking pretentious. “Oh, look at how goddamn intelligent I am, watch me quote shit no one cares about.” Do I care about Antigone right now? No. I would like to know what this fucking movie is about, how the actors portray the roles, the cinematography etc, all of this culminating in a decision as to whether or not I want to see the movie. I took Film & Lit too, Mudede, this is not how you write a fucking review.
With respect, Miss Seattle – if that is your real name! – this review explains enough without relying on Antigone (which I have not read) – and furthermore it explains the classical allusion with reference to the plot. Placing it canonically, thematically, culturally…kind of what reviews do.
Antigone is hardly as arcane as those so stupid that they think the sounds their asses make express their ideas (‘fart’, ‘fart noise here’ imagine that I am communicating by farting, okay?’) might think. And who reads film reviews to “identify” with them? There are ‘news’ sources for the Moron Community everywhere, and/or you can start a forum where you can ask each others’ butts to review the latest movies–so back off the Mudede, nitwits.
Charles, thanks so much for writing about Enter the Void. Yours is the most lucid and insightful commentary I’ve found so far. I very much appreciated the Hegel/Antigone analogy–this seems like the proper read, or at least one proper read of an extremely impressionistic film. I’d argue, not having seen Noe’s other work, that Enter the Void is indeed successful. Hours later I feel like I’m still there inside it.
Sounds a little like that Bolano story (“The Return?”) about the ghost who watches a fashion designer fuck his corpse, and then they become friends.
Whenever I think about Irreversible, I wish I could unwatch it. Not that it’s a bad film, it’s just traumatic and makes me never want to see it or anything like it again. Sorry about what this means for your future career, Gaspar!
I was impressed. Mudede didn’t refer to Marxism once, of course, typing the word ‘Rectum’ probably acted as a decent surrogate.
He does drag Hegel into the whole mix.
Is there a secret army of Philosophy undergrads with ponytails who jack off to Mudede’s nonsense?
Is there a pill that can make SleepingWithNannyState funny or less troll-like? I’m willing to pay top dollar.
This is what happens when you let liberal arts majors write film reviews. You get you get six paragraphs of Aeschylus, Bach and Hegel and one paragraph of what the fucking film is about. This is embarrassing, even by The Stranger’s standards
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
SHAME ON YOU NORTHWEST FILM FORUM!
I went to see this on Saturday at the Northwest Film Forum in Seattle and had a really great movie experience. Only problem was THEY PLAYED THE MOVIE IN THE WRONG ORDER!!!!!!
That’s right, the last reel of the film was played in the middle, so that Oscar appears to be reincarnated(?) into his sister’s baby and born and the film ends… or so we thought. In what I saw as a great nod to Bergman’s PERSONA, the film rolled out abruptly to the point where people started to shuffle in their seats and began to leave the theater only for-what I now think was third reel of- the film to start again right at the point where Oscar has sex with Victor’s mother. Brilliant! I thought.
Then the film goes on and ended with us believing that Oscar was reincarnated into his sister’s aborted fetus maybe? or maybe into the void-as that was the final image we were left with when the lights came up.
Needless to say, this is a pretty messed up movie to watch anyway, but to walk around thinking it ended on that image of the aborted fetus is really f’d up! Unaware that this was a false version of the film- it didn’t stop me from going to the Northwest Film Forum again last night with my wife and a friend to take the whole experience for a second time. Only this time I was completely taken out of the movie because I was questioning whether I watched it wrong then or I was watching it wrong now. Obviously I realized pretty quick that I had watched it wrong then.
It was really disheartening to realize that at the Northwest Film Forum this could happen without them barring the doors and apologizing profusely and giving everyone their money back for completely screwing up everyone’s 2 1/2 + hours. Instead they just let a whole theater of people leave with their mind’s mashed in the wrong order. I know this kind of thing happens but at a place that holds itself as a preserver of the integrity of film (or something equally as snooty) you would think they would respect their paying customers, if not the filmmakers they are entrusted by. NOPE.
Play your movies right Northwest Film Forum! It is the absolute LEAST you can do.
“Is there a pill that can make SleepingWithNannyState funny or less troll-like? I’m willing to pay top dollar. “
Probably the same one that prevents shoe gazing and sophomoric fawning over pseudo-intellectual film reviews.
SevenDaughters – yeah, MissSeattle is my real name. As Seven Daughters is yours. Moron. And yes, people do read reviews to identify with them to decide whether or not they may like to see a particular film. Reviews written with intelligence, allegory and thought are great. Reviews written with “look-how-much-more-I-know” bullshit references are not. For example, Lindy West writes amazing film reviews. Mudede does not.
I heart SleepingWithNannyState and Sergei. Mudede is a pompous, pontificating ass.