Noe drops to .500

I think of myself as being a passionate fan of the works of French director Gaspar Noe, but the last year or so has delivered a bit of a hit to that assessment.

He's made six feature films -- we'll get to the short Lux Aeterna in a moment -- and after this week's viewing of Vortex, I only like three of them.

Don't get me wrong; the three I like, I love. That's a difficult assessment to make about a film that contains a brutal eight-minute (or so) rape scene, but I think it's true that Irreversible (2002) is brilliant. I am slightly less of a fan, but still an ardent one, of Enter the Void (2009), and Climax (2018) takes me right back up to Irreversible levels. Sadly, Climax is the only one of those I saw in time to rank it, and until I release my 2022 rankings in a few weeks, it remains the only Noe film I've ranked.

Love (2015) is his next film that comes closest to the minimum threshold of "like," and in fact, I did give it three stars when I got to it about a year after it was in theaters. But let's be honest, it's not great. It does showcase the button-pushing for which Noe is known -- the graphic sex includes a shot of a penis ejaculating at the camera (which was in 3D for audiences who could see it that way) -- but it's low on the profundities that I find contained in his best work. 

Then I finally got to his 1998 debut I Stand Alone in August of 2021. (I had thought it was in 2022 until I just checked it.) This had a grimy Eastern European nihilism and toxicity that made me want to stop watching. It's the character who's saying the bad things, not Noe, but I didn't find anything about it enriching to our discourse, nor anything technically interesting that I remember. 

Vortex (2021, but I'll be ranking it in 2022 as it wasn't released outside France until then) is almost certainly his most humane film, but it was also a snooze. As you might be able to tell from the poster above, it focuses on two elderly people. As you wouldn't be able to tell, they live in a Paris apartment, though the extent that they are living is debatable. The film measures their decline as one of them deals with Alzheimer's and the other with heart problems.

Noe does have a primary technical trick he's trying out here, which is that the film is shot in split screen, one showing her and one showing him. There are some long unbroken takes with a high degree of difficulty, where the two have to pass each other within the apartment without the other cameraman appearing in the shot. However, Noe doesn't hold himself to very high standards of stringency -- you can tell that he's added cuts to paste over moments when the execution of this logistical exercise was not pulled off perfectly. So while there is a basic impressiveness to the attempt, it ultimately falls a little flat.

The other thing is that I was expecting -- given both Noe's proclivity for the outrageous and the title of the movie -- that this would descend into truly horrific states of madness, like the second half of Climax. It doesn't. It stays in a state of low energy throughout the running time. Some sad things occur, and we should appreciate the fact that Noe wants to make a film that provokes in ways that might be off brand for him. The problem, though, is that I came here for the brand, and I didn't get it to the extent I had hoped.

In fact, if not for some decisions in the very final push of the film, and particularly its last two minutes, Vortex would have ended up with only two stars from me on Letterboxd. Those profound final impressions did elevate it to 2.5 stars. But that's still half the number of stars I gave Irreversible, and nearly half of what I gave Climax. 

I said I'd mention Lux Aeterna (2019).

Wikipedia lists this as a seventh feature film for Noe, but I have my own definitions of those things. It's only 51 minutes long, and I just can't can't categorize a movie of that length made within the past 90 years as a feature film. 

And if I did include it, it would actually bring Noe's record under .500, if we are continuing the sports team metaphor. He'd have three wins and four losses. I also thought I watched this in 2022, but it turns out it was within a few days of I Stand Alone in August of 2021. I know this only from finding my mention of it in a Facebook Messenger chat with my friend, since I don't document the dates I watch things that I don't consider to be features.

Oh there's interesting stuff in Lux Aeterna to be sure. It also uses split screen, and seems to make allusions to Suspiria -- an obvious favorite of Noe's, since he used Dario Argento as an actor in Vortex, and Suspiria is one of the movie titles visible during the opening interviews portion of Climax. But the film ends with nearly ten minutes of strobe light, a distended amplification of an effect I found profound at the end of Irreversible. Here I just found it unpleasant.

Which was certainly the point, but every unpleasantness Noe has subjected us to in the past was intended to have an enriching artistic benefit, usually getting there. I just hope he hasn't lost sight of how to do that.