Gaspar Noé was present at this screening of his third feature and he delightedly revealed to his audience the genesis for this film: its roots lie in the fertile nursery soil of his teenage years; spent ingesting weed, mushrooms and acid trips. From these experiences sprouted the idea to make a film from the point of view (POV) of a “stoned” character. Noé also sportingly let us know that the “real meaning” of the film would only become apparent if we could decipher the last shot. He should have thought of that one before Irreversible (2002) - maybe less people would have walked out of the screenings. Maybe. 

Anyone who has seen Noé’s second feature may have some inclination of what to expect from Enter the Void, and they may be partly right.  Uncompromising and controversial, Noé, he would suggest, intends to shock his congregation into thought, just like the other directors marked with the New French Extremity brand, or a vitriolic and literal reading of the Old Testament might. On watching Irreversible for the first time, I thought that he was saying, with a surfeit of scatological, metaphorical imagery, that Europe is/was an arsehole, the same as I did on the fourth occasion I watched it. From this then it was then rather too easy to posit what he assumes the inhabitants of Europe to be. 

However, Noé has ensured that his new film is not to be so instantaneously interpreted/able by laminating each image with opaque ambiguity. He also, once again, employs an elaborate and technically complex narrative treatment. That Irreversible unfolded in reverse order, like Memento (Nolan 2000), required some dedicated concentration from its audience, and the plot of Void, which winds around itself like so many intestines, is no less craving of an avid observer. Noé has buried his message in such a labyrinthine, convoluted film that it is almost impossible at times to follow any single train of thought.

Apart from this intestitudinal story, Noé, enlists a number of other techniques to both destabilise any sense of narrative surety and, ambivalently, to also weave the strands, characters and eras (back) together in some meaningful composite.

From the opening credits, which encompass a plethora of calligraphic styles, (but most with a Japanese bent, hinting at the destination here, before the opening scene); from Manga to that of neon signs, the screen is violated with the flash trickery of a magician-technician attempting every illusion simultaneously.

We open with the protagonist, Oscar, an American boy in his twenties and a young, female companion, Linda, who, for the time being, could be either his girlfriend, friend or sister, on a balcony overlooking a street, immersed in Tokyo’s myriad neon lights. What is immediately of note is that we are viewing the scene from Oscar’s point of view, there is no establishing shot, so we do not even have the security of facial recognition of our ‘hero’. The camera remains subjective, as Oscar’s perspective, even blinking as if an eye; for the duration of the scene, in which he points out a passing plane, the companions squabble, and she leaves the flat. Whereupon Noé gets his boyhood wish and Oscar begins to get stoned…

Immediately Oscar achieves his and Noé’s aim the camera drifts above him, no longer his POV – and begins to dissolve into shots of what is best described as spinning, scary, stoned, psychedelic, flashy lights much like you would imagine the screen of a three-dimensional neon kaleidoscope, or an active icicle or snow-flake under a microscope, backlit by the light from a Shaman’s soul. Accompanying the visual trance, the ambience of psychedelia is enhanced with the aural trip of the garbled noise of what seems to be an un-tuned radio station stretching over a ravine of interference in order to retune itself, slowly metamorphosing into low frequency whines. All of this is interrupted by the ring of Oscar’s mobile, the lights on his phone gradually coming into focus through the dark, their shapes mirroring those recently passed; a fusion of stoned snowflakes and reality.

After this conscious attempt at fragmentation the camera returns to Oscar’s perspective. With no other characters present we now hear Oscar’s thoughts and ‘see’ him for the first time reflected in a bathroom mirror. He is visited by Alex, a beatnik junky, and subject of Oscar and Linda’s (who is here revealed as sister to Oscar) earlier argument. Alex acts as an intoxicated soothsayer: the clues and motifs of the future spewing forth in his inane ramblings; heavy trips, reincarnation, out of body experiences, whilst they walk to a club so Oscar can deal some hallucinogens to a friend, The ‘club’ is the eponymous Void and is analogous to the ‘Rectum’ in Irreversible, in set-design and nature, although not the sado-masochistic sex-pit, just a darkened bar, from which a violence propels the story.

Oscar is deceived, ‘grassed up’ by his friend and is chased into a toilet cubicle by police, attendant at the scene. The stall is repulsively grim and grimy with smeared faecal matter, and, like Vincent Cassell’s Marcus in Irreversible, this dark excremental hole becomes the scene of a really bad decision by Oscar, which affects the rest of the narrative. Oscar screams at the officers banging on the toilet door that he has a gun, whilst he desperately attempts to dump the drugs and search the dirty confines for escape. Without warning, he is shot, a truly shocking moment as, from his POV, we see an explosion of gore, discharged from his torso, splatter the squalid, stained wall ahead of him. Oscar blacks out, and the camera descends into a neon cube, lights reflected, refracted throughout, flower-shaped illuminations blossoming, a strobe flashing, high-pitched whines, low thudding beats. Again, we are pitched into a parallel, surreal world, but this time not that of a trip, but of death. The ultimate trip, Alex might say. 

After an overhead tracking shot, which we’ll return to in a while, Alex, spooked by the whole scenario - justifiably, as the death of a close friend cannot be easy to compute, especially when they have been gunned down by foreign police as a drug-dealer and one is frazzled on a cocktail of fantastic narcotics - bolts, escaping the law and ending up at Linda’s workplace. Linda is, luckily for Noé and any other men with a prepubescent boy’s instincts, a stripper. As Alex is a fugitive, he cannot enter the club, but we can. Still on the crest of the tracking shot, we penetrate the floor, the actual stage on which the dancers denude, and appear in the room, accompanied by the near-constant (heart)beat on the soundtrack, via a hexagonal/flower-shaped light. These shapes gradually become signifiers of sorts, links between scenes, pasts and presents.

In asking us to twist the scope/lens of the metaphorical kaleidoscope, attempting to gain an overview and discover the meaning beyond these disorientating effects (which only worsen from hereon in), Noé also inadvertently inspires us to ask, is there anything else? Is it worth the effort? If, indeed, this film is any good?

I feel I need to highlight, at this point, the near-universal abomination of the acting: Nathaniel Brown warrants particular focus as Oscar, as he does a sublime impression of Keanu Reeves impersonating an artist’s mannequin. The only cast member who evoked emotion beyond frustrated vexation was the six-year-old Emily Alyn Lind, as a young Linda. However, most of the characters are so stoned that they pass through their lives, and therefore the film, like contemporary kin of those in Herzog’s Heart of Glass (1976), making it difficult to tell what they are doing or whether they are terrible actors or simply competent dummies.

In addition, the necromantic illusions Noé pulls out of his stove-pipe hat are purloined. The various elements of the film, all vying for precedence - the options left open to us in deciphering the film post-Oscar’s death (a dream, a trip, an out-of-body experience, a limbo before re-incarnation) - create aligned, alternate ‘truths’. Yet, this is nothing new, not at all. For offbeat American instances, think Donnie Darko (Kelly, 2001) or Spike Jones’ Being John Malkovich (1999), with more psychotropic pretensions, or for diabolically bewildering French lunacy with a Vincent Cassell link, try Kim Chapiron’s lunatic Sheitan (2006).

Noé is far from having a hatful of formal innovations, more a hatful of hollow. Even the POV, subjective perspective camera has been used on copious occasions previously, and seems ubiquitous in current cinema. Recently you would only need look as far as Romero’s re-envisioning of his own Dead franchise, Diary of the Dead (2007) or Matt Reeves’ Cloverfield (2008). In particular I’d suggest last years Hooked (Adrian Sitaru), reviewed at http://alittlepoison.com/2008/11/07/the-gleaning-of-liff/#link5, with plenty of examples given there, including the shower scene of Psycho (1960), for instance.

Noé may argue that his POV camera has a blinking eye effect, but even this he himself has experimented with before with his short We Fuck Alone (2006). This film is Noé’s literal and masturbatory response to the Destricted art project’s uninspiring brief for the associated filmmakers to “capture their view of sex and pornography”. We are presented with two characters masturbating in front of the camera. By employing the ‘blinking’ technique, Noé makes clear the presence of another and thus renders the title ironic. But the complexity ends here; it is all as obvious and puerile as it sounds.

We do have, however that overhead tracking shot referred to a couple of paragraphs ago, the one that here deports us from inside the Void to Linda’s strip club. This particular shoot has become a staple of Noé’s later work, for example nearly the entirety of We Fuck Alone is shot from this camera angle. On this occasion however, it is more than just repetition, and actually mimics exactly the tracking shot in the opening scene of Irreversible replete with emergency services, an ambulance’s flashing lights etc. Yet, more famously (and importantly) this technique was used by Scorsese for the ‘shoot-out’ in Taxi DriverFrenzy (1972) and by Welles at the opening of Touch of Evil (1958) before the car-bomb explosion that kills two. The difference is that rather than using this as an audacious and occasional flourish, adding dramatic depth to a scene, Noé has made this his signature shot and, as it is employed habitually, it loses essence.

Yet, in Void, Noé employs the overhead tracking shot as an alternative editing device. Instead of crosscutting between scenes, a necessarily penetrative and disjunctive act, the camera travels above the scenes, over streets, through walls and roofs, dipping into the co-existing lives of characters. This is just one way in which Noé attempts to steady the trip, establish meaning and create links between the characters. This floating, omnipresent, omniscient camera, already established through the earlier POV shots as ‘Oscar’, must be either his soul or his vision of his hallucination.

Noé attempts to further gel the sometimes disparate themes by using ‘psychedelic portholes’: those spiralling camera movements that disappear through various holes - cooker hobs, ashtrays, bullet-wounds, belly-buttons - into a wonderland of psychedelia, only to appear again in a corresponding orifice in another scene, which is occasionally in the past. 

Noé is presenting complimentary ideas, through the use of analogous techniques, to those in We Fuck Alone and Irreversible, the most important of which concerns the ‘essential’ final shot of Void.  It is blurred, deliberately out of focus, and the subject, although one can tell it is the outline of a woman, I could not decipher.  It was, therefore, superfluous, redundant even, and it then becomes a facsimile of the shot which appears in that harrowing, mid-point rape-scene in Irreversible. A character, again, out-of-focus, and too distant to recognise, appears at the end of the underpass where the brutality takes place, only to exit without intervening. This person, one understands, could have halted the tragedy, which not only enhances the horror of the moment, as if it needs it, but their intervention would also have halted, truncated or, at least, deflected the trajectory of the narrative. However, if a member of the audience misses this flitting, transient, and vague figure, as difficult to spot as that in Void, then you are left with a different and, potentially lesser experience.

Yet, apart from this self-reflexivity, Noé also owes much to one David Lynch. For example, the ‘portholes’ here that function as junctions between alternate realities, can be seen in the severed ear through which Blue Velvet’s (1986) narrative descends; burrowing beneath the normalcy, the exterior of picket-fences and into the defiled territory of Frank Booth. There is also the withheld, delayed denouement of, say, Mulholland Drive (2001) or Inland Empire (2006) both of these and Void taking place on at least two plains at once. Yet, instead of creating a Lynchian hypnagogic state, one which locates itself in that twilight overlap of waking and sleep, Noé constructs one of pre-trip, post-death or, even pre-birth. Void is a hole filled with the formal innovations of others.

The problem with such a labyrinthine film is that you risk losing your audience, and you need to offer a beacon of light for them to follow. Noé offers too many lights, neon and otherwise, and ultimately confuses. Also, the acting and script do not induce the audience to care for any given character, and so the film relies on its viewers’ innate desire to sleuth, to discover and decipher the clues.

Beyond the confusions created by the subjective camera as Oscar’s soul/out-of body experience, or whatever, and the portholes teleporting us between scenes, the audience is also asked to hold on whilst Noé transports back and forth in time. Such narrative ambiguity could breed bafflement amongst the audience (and, therefore, disinterest). Yet Noé, once more, applies an adhesive through shot composition, to conjoin the time-scapes - the mise-en-scene of the present reflected exactly, through a fade, in tat of the past - in an attempt to limit the disorientation of the almost Proustian connections between present and past; memories.

These memories belong, in the main, to Linda, but, at times, one could read them as those of the omnipresent Oscar. Each of them involves them both as children and at points just constitute cliches of trite family happiness. Yet, gradually, after a horrific revelation, they become darker and more disturbing, and later still, they are flashbacks within flashbacks. Slowly, they suture the gaps in the narrative, the audience’s knowledge

However, the first of these recollections happens from the position of the current narrative. Before Linda finds out about her brother’s death, she is filmed having sex with her Japanese boyfriend, and the club’s manager, Mario. During which, the camera travelling into the back of Mario’s head, becoming his POV briefly and then returning to its bird’s-eye view, the importance of which will become apparent later. Mario leaves and Linda listens to her voicemail on which Alex has left a message describing Oscar’s death. As realisation speckles her face with pain, the camera defocuses and tracks back, she becomes a blurred pink spot adrift on the swell of a red couch.

In an example of Noé fusing past with present through shot composition, we cut to a little girl on a bed crying, watched by a little boy. She is placed in the same position as the mature Linda before her, in the centre of the screen, the camera focusing slowly. This sequence becomes a montage of childhood memories; holidays, swings, baths, sister and brother, mother and father. The suggestion that these are the younger forms of Oscar and Linda is overt.

There are a number of cuts between scenes of the adult Oscar and Linda on their beds (they still share a room in their cramped Tokyo apartment); he watching her, which dissolve into their younger selves in which the mise-en-scene of past and present match exactly. During one of these many memories, we are witness to the tragedy of the siblings’ parents’ deaths in a vicious car accident. One distinct difference between the past and present scenes is that the adult Linda is always, disturbingly, sitting around with her breasts exposed, cuddling a teddy bear (much like the girl in We Fuck Alone, to whom she must be a sister or a reincarnation).

As an audience we attempt an understanding of exactly what we are viewing: an out-of-body experience, a reincarnation or a trip, good or bad, and concurrently, still buffeted by this cacophony of images, we also venture at Noé’s purpose, the ‘meaning’. He purposefully dissuades us from uncomplicated conclusions, as every option could be true, and he interweaves each with at least one other in order to defer/deter simple resolution.
 
The dialogue, in transparent ways, strives to make many of these links between all of the potential truths and motifs. For example, the notion of the narrative as Oscar’s trip is joined to those of birth, reincarnation and even breastfeeding through Alex’s clunking colloquy on having his mouth wrapped around acid and spliffs being like having his lips on the teat. Later too, death and reincarnation are further appended to hallucinogenic trips, again by our prophetic hippy Alex, when the ‘drug’ DMT is, described as “the same chemical (Dimethyltryptamine) that the brain releases as when you die”.

However, the most likely narrative ‘truths’ are that Oscar dies and is re-incarnated or that everything that happens is an in utero forecast/dream. After Oscar’s shooting, the camera, hovering above events as ever, enters through the bullet-wound in his cadaver as he is laid out for identification, reappearing through a hole in a concrete mound in a child’s playground, on which we discover Linda sprawled, surrounded by pills, seemingly having attempted suicide. In this way death is shown as inseparable from life, like a Möbius strip, we may occasionally be unaware of the link, as life twists in on itself, but the journey to and from each is perpetual. 

Yet, as he leads us into holes, through tunnels, and out again, like a demented white rabbit, Noé asserts the linearity of birth and death as two ends of the same tunnel. After Oscar’s cremation, Noé’s camera hovers over an urn, delving into its sombre darkness, appearing in another locale, through a flower-shaped ashtray, and, now with omniscient fish-eye lens, travels into a gasring, fire blazing, and back out through Linda’s pregnant belly. Where we linger over the gruesome and needlessly gynaecological tableau of an abortion. We travel from death (Oscar’s ashes) to life (fire) and return to death (the abortion).

Consider the colour coding of not only this five or six minutes or so of footage, but the film as a whole and it is soon apparent that red takes dominance. The reds of fire, blood, lipsticks, bags, shoes, lights, the womb and more. Consider too the low thudding beat on the soundtrack that accompanies many scenes. Occasionally, it is the throb of blood in Oscar’s head as we see from his perspective, sometimes the pounding drums of dance music, but always, potentially, the heartbeat of a mother heard by an infant in utero.

All of this leads to the inference that Oscar’s soul has been ‘reborn’ and is, briefly, carried by his sister. Witness the earlier ‘joke’ when Oscar and Alex discuss Linda and her Japanese boyfriend, and Oscar says “If she ever has a baby by Mario I’m going to have to kill it”. Also, the tracking shot discussed above, when Oscar is killed the camera floats above him, as if becoming his soul, drifts through the streets, following Alex, and enters the strip club, where it hunts out Linda, following her to a changing room. Where she sleeps with Mario and whilst he is thrusting atop her, the camera momentarily enters his head, films from his perspective and retracts again to float above them. From this sexual liaison Linda becomes pregnant and her foetus carries the soul of her dead brother. If this theory holds, then after Linda terminates the foetus, Oscar’s soul restlessly floats around searching for another host.

In the sequence where the camera flies above Tokyo, an aerial shot that is much higher than any before, we suddenly penetrate the fuselage of a plane (which could well be the one that Oscar pointed out to Linda at the outset of the film), and there are the siblings’ mother and father and, one assumes, Oscar, breastfeeding.  This, again, muddies the waters somewhat. Is Oscar’s soul now searching for his previous infant self to inhabit?

Earlier in the film, Oscar visits Alex’s flat where he meets his flatmate, who is building a fluorescent model of Tokyo in his bedroom and the intoxicated Oscar suggests that it would be great if the model of the Love Hotel were occupied by all of their friends, fornicating with one another. And it is this model into which the camera descends from the plane, skimming the rooftops and arriving, of course, at the Love Hotel. Alex and Linda enter, below, far below, and the camera breaks the rules and permeates a window, scanning each room, as if searching, chaperoned by the whirring fan noise reminiscent of Irreversible, intermittent like a siren, on the soundtrack. In each chamber is a couple, at least, sometimes more, entwined in coitus. What strikes you about this hardcore-Fellini-esque, orgiastic sequence, is that smoky light emanates from each point of sexual contact: mostly vaginas and penises, but mouths and penises, and vaginas and mouths too. Apart from being a convenient way to redact sexually explicit material, not something Noé concerns himself with, one would assume, these amorphous beams represent a further merging of the issues at hand: sexual congress, portals and the soul as it travels through time and space.

Finally, the camera hesitates and delves into the head of a man, evoking the earlier scene of Mario and Linda and the gun-wound sequence of Roeg and Cammell’s 1970 Performance, whilst he is mating, becoming his POV, focussed on his partners face. Once more, however, it recedes, gliding about until it finds Alex and Linda, who, of course are rutting like beasts too. Here, too Noé complicates issues, when Linda metamorphoses into her mother, glancing over Alex’s shoulder at the young Oscar watching them from a doorway, before she returns to herself again. (1976) and Hitchcock after one of the murders in

(At this juncture, Noé serves up the clattering provocation of an internal camera-shot of a penis thrusting into a vagina. It certainly got me thinking.)

This all cannot but induce thoughts of Buddhist rebirth; Oscar as represented by the camera becomes, before and after his death. Another view of rebirth describes the cycle of death and rebirth in the context of consciousness rather than the birth and death of the body. The movement of the camera through time and space is like a stream of consciousness, a causal continuum.

This may well align Void as the art-house Matrix, yet with extra drugs and vaginas as portholes, which would be a disservice to Noé. However, Void is imbued with the same sort of fan-boy trickery, plank-y acting and faux-philosophical meanderings. Noé has created a rich, neon cacophony, an aural assault of ideas which wend and wind their way around a relatively simple narrative with sometimes perplexing glee. And, what if, like me, you don’t ‘get’ the final shot, can’t decipher its blurry significance? It could indeed render all that has gone before as so much self-indulgent twaddle.

Rather than a Lynchian oneiric world, a state of perpetual and pure surrealism (the coexistence and commingling of plains of dream and reality), Noé has created one of onanism instead. It is a multi-faceted realm which finally twists so far around itself that, if you are not quick enough to acknowledge that ‘key’ final porthole as we pass through it, it disappears into its own void.

Contributor details

Kierran Horner lives in London where he works and writes and previously studied English Literature as an undergraduate, and, as a postgraduate, Film Studies both at the University of London.