Enter the Void (2009): a city symphony in 21st-century neon (Review)

Gaspar Noé’s new film Vortex, currently on release in UK cinemas, is shocking audiences in perhaps the only way Noé can shock people at this juncture: by removing his usual graphic violence and unsimulated sex in favour of a sensitive exploration of dementia and death. There is another film called Vortex in the director’s back catalogue, though. Included in the extra features for Arrow’s new Blu-Ray of his 2009 film Enter the Void, it’s one of two short CGI animations that attempt to evoke a DMT trip. Edited into Enter the Void, they form part of the feature’s epic voyage, beginning with the last moments of a young American hedonist’s life in Tokyo before showing his soul floating loose through space and time, ending in what might be another incarnation.

It might just be the ultimate trip, and sure enough, Noé repeatedly invokes 2001: A Space Odyssey, although less directly than he did in Irreversible. That film placed a poster for Kubrick’s film in its heroine’s bedroom, just as Climax begins with a display of the film’s inspirations on VHS. I should lay my cards on the table here and say that this kind of reference-flagging is one of the many mannerisms in Noé’s films that normally gets on my nerves. It seems symptomatic of a director who doesn’t trust the audience to notice things on their own, as well as raising the question of what inspiration, exactly, Noé is taking from these films. For all the attention Noé’s work pays to the stylistic tics of Kubrick, Pasolini, Anger et al, the underlying ideas that make these directors worth studying are stripped out.

I was pleased, then, to catch up with Enter the Void and discover something markedly different. Some of the problems I usually have with Noé remain: the film is presented here in two cuts, one of which is twenty minutes shorter than the other, and yet both versions struck me as exasperatingly overlong. Once more, Noé never makes a point once when he can make it fifteen or sixteen times, and the film’s major inspiration is both mentioned and summarised by Cyril Roy’s Alex at the start of the movie. This time, though, the key source isn’t some familiar arthouse classic, it’s the Tibetan Book of the Dead. That’s the first big surprise, and the rest of the film continues to deliver on that front.

As the hero, Oscar, spirals over cities and back through his last life, he gets little chance to emote: for most of the film lead actor Nathaniel Brown is asked to provide little more than the back of his head. That’s fine, because the real central character is Benoît Debie’s camera. I wondered whether, aside from his movies, Noé was also influenced by Stanley Kubrick’s famous quip about Max Ophüls being able to pass his camera through walls. Debie literally achieves this in Enter the Void, as well as composing elegant match cuts between Oscar’s past and his present and several other attempts to visualise the barely imaginable. Sometimes Enter the Void is a silent city symphony rendered in 21st-century neon, sometimes it’s a psychosexual autobiography of its lead character. Sometimes it slips the boundaries of narrative entirely and becomes purely visual, not least in those trip-mimicking computer animations.

It is in these passages, where the film becomes most experiential, that Noé’s claim to genius rests. His abilities as a straightforward dramatist are more questionable, and his fans might justly argue that when the film is as consistently formally original as Enter the Void, who cares? Does it matter that the characters are thin and the dialogue is didactic when neither of these things are the point of the film? For this viewer, it does sometimes get in the way – but Enter the Void has another ace card in the form of Paz de la Huerta’s performance as Linda. Linda is not a tremendously well-rounded character; she’s a traumatised child-woman who has a borderline-incestuous relationship with her brother Oscar, but whose essential innocence is subtly displayed in the scenes where she clutches a large teddy. Yet de la Huerta’s performance is forceful and passionate enough to cut through Noé and Debie’s sensory overload. De la Huerta spent much of the late 2000s and 2010s being mocked as a drunk exhibitionist before it emerged that she was a victim of Harvey Weinstein. That discovery earned her a measure of sympathy but not enough reassessment. It is fascinating to return to her performance in Enter the Void and find that all the elements of her work that people once mocked – the high drama, the high volume, the constant nudity – now resemble a kind of exorcism.

Noé, to his credit, created the environment where she could deliver this: I’m not sure her performance in Nurse 3D is going to be worth revisiting in the same way. For all its limitations, there’s a level of sincerity in Enter the Void that some observers – myself included – have been reluctant to allow the director. Arrow’s extra features include a video essay in which Alexandra Heller-Nicolas argues more forcefully for the film’s merits, plus a look at the justly famous opening credits. Some of the extras are carried over from previous editions, including a revealing look at how the perfectly-integrated CGI effects were achieved, and there is a wholly new booklet including an oral history of the film’s making.

Graham on Enter the Void (2009)