Tag: Gaspar Noé

Our dirty questions to Gaspar Noé

Posted on by victorfraga
Picture above: Getty Images for the Red Sea International Film Festival

Enfant terrible, pornographer, subversive genius, provocateur. These are some of the accolades that have been bestowed upon the Argentinean-born filmmaker, who moved to France aged 13. The director is best remembered for his deeply provocative and often sexually explicit films Irreversible (2002), Love (2015), Climax (2018), Lux Aeterna (2019). His new film Vortex (2021) is a far dirtier movie, instead focussing on the more universal and accessible topic of dementia (featuring octogenarian Italian filmmaker Dario Argento in the lead).

Victor Fraga briefly sat down with Gaspar at the 2nd Red Sea International Film Festival. The event takes place between December 1st and 20th in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

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Victor Fraga – You are a deeply subversive director. How does it feel to be here in Saudi Arabia, of all places. Were you surprised by the invitation?

Gaspar Noé – The idea of doing this Festival started three years ago, and then because of Covid they had to postpone for a year. They are rescheduling the future of this country [laughs]. Of course I was surprised when I received the invitation. I just got invited Vortex was part of the programme last year because it’s a general audience movie. It deals with a very universal subject: old age and dementia. Everybody has someone in their family who’s old and demented. You can be rich, and can be poor, you can be Saudi, Brazilian or British. Old age is everywhere, and the issues are the same.

I was invited to attend the Red Sea Film festival last year, but I couldn’t come because I had to see my father in Buenos, and that’s the opposite side of the planet. I’m so happy that they reinvited me this year, just just for a masterclass! I hope this festival will push many locals to doing film. I’d love to see more films from countries that have not been so productive

VF – How did audiences react to Vortex?

GN – I wasn’t here last year when they showed it, but I don’t think people were shocked. Either they cry or they don’t cry. Or they come out of the cinema in a bad mood [laughs out loud].

VF – Do you think you could eventually show films like Irreversible, Love or Climax here in Saudi Arabia?

GN – No! But, you know, nowadays when people want to do something they just go on the Internet, where all sorts of films can be found illegally. So, if anyone wants to see my body of work, they will find a clever way to way to watch it, be they in Saudi Arabia or anywhere else. Censorship used to work five decades because you could only show a movie on a big screen, with a 35mm print. or on television. And you could control cinema and television. But nowadays with the Internet is a permanent flow of images coming from every country in the world. You can not fight against the new technologies. You should ride them instead.

VF – Have Arab cinema, or Arab culture more broadly influenced you and your work?

GN – The first Arab movie that really impressed me was directed by an Italian filmmaker. It was The Battle of Algiers [Gillo Ponecorvo, 1966]. Lately I have been watching a lot of Iranian movies. There are so many masterpieces. You know an Iranian classic called The Cycle [Dariush Mehrju’i, 1975]? I love it so much. It’s about a man whose father is sick and he starts selling his blood in order to help him pay for his doctor. It’s about the last job you would ant. It’s such a sad movie about financial misery!

VF – The Guardian called Vortex “decidedly unprovocative”. Do you agree with that?

GN – I didn’t want my movie to be funny in any way. Still, when Dario [Argento] talks to his wife, he’s very funny. And I didn’t want to add any shock value.

VF – And why is that?

GN – That’s because many people in the audience will know the condition in their own flesh because they are dealing with a demented parent or relative. I wanted to be respectful to my own mother, and towards so many other people. Vortex is s not a second degree movie. In fact, it’s the first first-degree film I’ve ever done.

VF – You once said that “As soon as people see a cock in the UK or the US, they think they’ve seen the devil”. Are British people too prudish for Gaspar Noé? And would you ever make a film in the UK?

GN – Things are changing. On one hand, the Brits made films like Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960) or Performance (Donald Cammell/ Nicolas Roeg, 1970), but the relationship of Brits to censorship is very weird. There’s a lot of stuff that I’ve made that’s perfectly acceptable in Italy and France, but in Britain they will want to cut some scenes out. That’s changing because nowadays people can watch films of DVD, Blu-ray, or simply send files to their friends! It’s very hard to censor films. And the shocking movies are no longer that shocking because people have seen all sorts of stuff. People have assimilated violence so well that they can tell what is and what isn’t true! If you show a cannibal movie now people will just get bored because they know it isn’t true.

VF – So no plans to

Lux Aeterna

Posted on by victorfraga

At just 50 minutes of duration, Gaspar Noe’s latest movie constantly challenges its audience. The director uses his trademark colourful flashing lights in abundance, combined with a screechy cacophony of music and sounds. You are guaranteed to leave the cinema with a throbbing headache. Which is exactly what the 55-year-old Argentinean-born French filmmaker wants.

The film starts out nicely. A very relaxed Charlotte Gainsbourg talks to Beatrice Dalle (both French actresses play themselves) about the joys of filmmaking, and share some very spicy secrets about their career. Gainsbourg reveals that once a handsome young actor ejaculated on her leg. It reminded me a lot of “the most erotic scene in the history of cinema”, in Bergman’s Persona (1966). Except that the screen is split in two, with one actress on each side. Subtitles are also split.

Gradually, the film descends into a nightmare. The actresses prepare to a scene on which they are burnt at the stake. The film frequently references to Carl Dreyer’s classic Day of Wrath (1943), in which a woman is accused of witchcraft during the Middle Ages, and numerous females are burnt alive throughout. The crew is constantly arguing and shouting at each other. An aspiring filmmaker is trying to tell Charlotte about his upcoming project. Charlotte receives a telephone call informing her that her daughter has possibly been abused at school. All of this takes at the same time in the setting. It’s impossible to work out exactly what’s going on. Noe splits the screen in two, then in three. Conversations in different languages take place simultaneously. Tempers reach the point of ebullition. Gainsbourg is tied to the stake. She panics. It’s not clear whether she’s acting or indeed scared for her life. Guaranteed to piss off #MeToo enthusiasts without a sense of irony.

Lux Aeterna is film about the almighty male auteur who constantly tortures his female subjects. By extension, it’s a film about sexism in the film industry. Directors believe that they are God, and their formidable attitude can intimidate and scare the vulnerable actresses. Ultimately, cinema is a curse. And the filmmaker isn’t God, but the devil himself. We learn that Dreyer left his actress for two hours at the stake, and that the horror on her face was probably very real. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Jean-Luc Godard and Luis Bunuel are quoted (their names, however, aren’t clearly displayed). I found it strange Werner Herzog was missing. The German director infamously threatened his cast with violence and even murder.

Cinephiles and film professionals will likely appreciate Lux Aeterna. It will do well in film festival across the Globe. The movie constantly references such events. At one point, the Cannes tune can be heard in the background. The broader public, however, will likely find the film pretentious and self-conceited. They Latin title and the numerous references will alienate those less familiar with the history of the seventh art.

Lux Aeterna premiered at the 72nd Cannes International Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. The screening was scheduled to begin at 00:15, but it was about 4o minutes late. Keen viewers had to wait outside in their tuxedos and evening dresses under the rain while the Festival vacated the 2,309-seater, and the director and cast walked up the red carpet. Perhaps that was part of the film gimmicks: audiences were made to suffer both inside and outside the cinema.

On Arrow Films on June 3rd, 2022.

Climax

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Cinema at its purest. Bright white on a screen. A woman starts crawling from the top of the screen. Extreme audience disorientation. We realise she’s crawling through snow. She appears to be in a bad way. Traces of blood. The camera follows her forward movement down the screen. Slowly a tree comes into shot from the bottom. We are watching the same overhead camera movement.

A series of vox pops on a television screen with shelves of books on one side and piles of DVDs on the other. Dancers answer questions on why dance is important to them. Would they do anything in order to make it big? What would they do if they weren’t able to dance?

Then the narrative proper begins. It’s 1996. We’re inside a building with a dancefloor watching the most amazing dance routines we’ve ever seen. It’s the final rehearsal for a dance show. After which the dancers will let their hair down in a party with a DJ. Unaware that someone has spiked the punch. The party will turn into bad trip and an in-your-face vision of hell on earth.

Welcome to the extreme and confrontational cinema of Gaspar Noé (Irreversible, 2002; Enter The Void, 2009). He likes, say the press notes, to set up situations of anarchy and chaos and then commit them to film. Which sounds like a recipe for tedium – and might well be so in lesser hands – but Noé possesses an incredible eye and cinematic aesthetic and what he puts on the screen is never less than extraordinary.

He is equally adept at showing a deeply distressing scene in which men talk about potential sexual conquests among the women nearby or a compelling episode wherein one woman admits to another that she’s pregnant with no idea as to the identity of the father. If such scenes play on our prejudices and probe our sympathies for different characters, they slowly give way to something much more supercharged and kinetic even as they invest us emotionally in what we’re about to watch.

As Noé’s camera follows characters around the dance studio floor and the various rooms adjoining it, including a power supply room with high voltage equipment and ‘Danger Of Death’ notices on the door, he uses the full arsenal of cinematic tricks at his disposal. The camera rolls on its own axis so that sometimes, down is up, up as down and the floor is the ceiling. As the party gets increasingly out of hand, and a couple of performers decide to have sex in the background (that’s real sex, by the way, not the simulated for the cameras variety), the disorientated viewer is vaguely aware of them doing so on the floor in a top corner of the upside-down image above him or her.

There’s an intense physicality throughout running a whole gauntlet of states of being from intense sexual arousal, copulation and post-coital relaxation right the way through to anxiety, isolation, despair and death. Noe is a materialist: he thinks what matters is the here and now, the flesh, the carnal. His heaven and hell is found in our present existence, with the heaven of fleeting or lasting sexual relationship no more than a temporary respite from the hell comprising all the bad stuff, which is the only alternative.

The title Climax suggests a narrative aspiring to and reaching some sort of peak, hinting perhaps at an ecstatic, sexual group orgasm. That’s a sort of tease, because for many of the characters here the climax that they reach via their frenzied, drug-fuelled, dancing excess is more like the hurtling over the edge of a bottomless abyss rather than anything they might actually want. Or perhaps the characters here really do desire something like that. Who knows?

Yet in terms of both dance and cinematic technique the film has the feeling of someone grappling with the very foundations of the languages of both art forms to say something which has never been said before. Such wilful and controlled articulation of form, for this viewer at least, plays against the nihilism. That’s not to say the film is a pleasant experience exactly, but it certainly grabs the attention from its opening frame and never lets go, pushing the viewer into sensory overload and beyond even as it descends into madness and disorder.

Noé is extremely gifted, knows exactly what he’s doing, pulls out al the stops and never misses a trick. The result is both profoundly exhilarating and deeply depressing: an upper and a downer all in one. Most definitely not recommended for those of a nervous disposition: quite possibly, however, the dirty movie of the year.

Climax is out in the UK on Friday, September 21st. On VoD on Friday, February 8th.