2009 tripRating: 15/20
Plot: A drug dealer is shot and enters the titular void, an act which apparently involves a lot of floating and watching his sister have sex. Flashbacks reveal childhood tragedy and flashforwards reveal other things. Apparently, it's a Tibetan Book of the Dead thang.
Gaspar Noe makes incredibly happy films. In this one, he shows the viewer things they probably never thought they'd see and likely wouldn't want to. Queasy cinematography and hallucinatory hijinks, a true assault on the senses, make this unlike anything you've ever seen before unless you happened to see the only other Noe move on my blog, Irreversible. Noe attacks your eyes and ears and intentionally, I suspect, working to make the viewer a little nauseous, all while showing you things that you appreciate because you haven't seen anything like it on the screen before. I watched a great deal of this bloated guided tour through the world's most dismal kaleidoscope with mouth agape. And yes, I'm aware that there's a misplaced modifier in that sentence, but this movie took away my ability to fix things like that. Even the opening credits floored me, electric and shocking, especially when compared to the syrupy, more reflective pace of the movie. The mostly first-person perspective is unique, and Noe takes the viewer over the city, through light bulbs, deep into the past, despairingly into the future, into human beings, and pretty much anywhere else he feels like taking us. And looking at this from a purely technical standpoint, I don't see how he does it exactly and would label this a masterpiece, though not always an easy-to-watch masterpiece. The problem is that the movie is way too long, and the acting, especially from the kid who plays the lead, is bad in distracting ways. Both of those issues really take away some of the power this movie could have had. It's still an experience though, one that I'm not likely to ever forget, and I would recommend it to my more adventurous readers. Warning, however: It's not really very happy.
3 comments:
Paz sucks she ruins it. It also makes me not want to take DMT, which is a downer. Man the opening credits are sick. Yeah, it's a mind-blowing show off movie that makes you want it to chill out after a while. Good for him for making it.
I agree with your take on this one, especially the length. In the final twenty minutes, I rescinded the masterpiece status I had conferred on it during the first three hours, because a real master would know that my eyes and my bum hurt and it was time to go home.
I guess I'll have to watch Irreversible? Someone told me it was loathsome and so I stayed away, but now I'm curious.
I would not recommend Irreversible to anybody. Brutal and damaging to the psyche. It's powerful and a technical achievement like this one (not as trippy, just as disturbing) but it's just so hopeless or joyless or whatever -less you want to use to describe it that I can't recommend.
I am also not going to take DMT, Larst.
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