"Enter the Void" - Gaspar Noe's Ultimate Sensory Experience

Gaspar Noe's "Enter The Void," his first feature length film since the highly controversial "Irreversible," is one of the craziest head trip cinematic experiences I have ever sat through. A hallucinogenic kaleidoscope of colors, some of which looked like they were taken from Dario Argento's "Suspiria," it's a surreal out of body experience and the kind you would not see today in American cinema today. In a time of soulless remakes and films that shamelessly manipulate our emotions, "Enter The Void" is a one of kind motion picture that breaks boundaries to create something unlike anything we have seen before. Like Gaspar's previous films, it is destined to have sharply polarized reactions. Some will admire it if not love it, and others will find it excruciating to sit through. For myself, I was mesmerized from beginning to end, thankful that I got to take in something not bound by your typical Hollywood formulaic screenplay.

Straight after the IFC Films logo appears, Gaspar propels us into his drug-fueled vision by starting off with the end credits (just like he did with "Irreversible") and racing through them at warp speed. Watching this, I was reminded of what Homer Simpson said during the end credits of "The Simpsons Movie:"

"A lot of people worked hard on this film, and all they ask is for you to memorize their names!"

Then the movie goes from there into the opening titles which themselves are exhilaratingly creative and makes you feel like you're at a furious rave in Tokyo. Crazy visuals done to the music of Daft Punk's Thomas Bangalter, they alone were worth the price of admission and got the applause of the audience I saw it with at the Lamelle Sunset 5 in Los Angeles.

The word ENTER being blasted onto the screen, and we then make it to the seamier side of Tokyo as seen through the eyes of the main character, Oscar (Nathaniel Brown). Just like in the opening sequence of Kathryn Bigelow's "Strange Days," we see everything from his perspective as he talks with his sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta) who lives with him in a small apartment, and as he smokes some Dimethyltryptamine (DMT for short) which provides him with the ultimate high filled with amazingly beautiful colors. During this time, we see that Oscar is reading a book his friend Alex (Cyril Roy) gave him called the "Tibetan Book of the Dead." Alex explains to him that the book describes one person's experience after death, and how it eventually leads to rebirth. From there, you get a good idea of where "Enter The Void" is going to headed as Oscar ends up getting shot to death by the police while trying to flush his drugs down the toilet.
At this point, the movie becomes an entirely out of body experience as we see Oscar die through his perception, and the world as he knows it black out completely. The perspective doesn't change from Oscar, but his soul (no longer caged in its human form) rises from his lifeless body. From then on, he floats through the darker sections of Tokyo as he watches over his sister as she then moves on with life, devastated that she can no longer spend it with her dear brother.

Gaspar also switches the story back and forth in time as we come to see the connection Oscar and Linda develop in their youth, and how the promise to be together always even as tragic circumstances cast a scary shadow over their lives.

Many will probably see "Enter The Void" as being nothing more than a pro-drug movie, but that's really up for the viewer to decide. This is a movie that is meant for an adult crowd anyway, and by then we know enough to make our own choices even if they are spectacularly bad ones. With drug trips (or so I am told), you are lifted high into a state of euphoria that seems untouchable in our everyday lives, but you are also brought down to emotionally shattering lows which you will want to look away from, but you won't be able to tear your eyes away from what you will soon wish you'd forget. Your mind may be freed up in this state, but don't ever expect to have any control over it when this happens. Some of these visions Oscar experiences lead into possible incestuous feelings for his sister, the kind we would not want to have let alone recognize within ourselves.

Look, I'm not saying drugs are right, but if we're not taking something illegal and very dangerous, then we are probably relying on something pharmaceutical. Anyway, this is not a movie to get all political about.

When the movie does veer into Oscar's youth, we get to see the close relationship he and his sister have with their ever loving parents, and the times we see them spend together are very sweet and captured with a strong sense of innocence. But this later turns out to be a setup for when the parents are killed in horrific fashion when a truck going in the wrong direction smashes right into their car, killing them instantly. It's impossible not to feel the shattered emotions of the children as they sit in the backseat, forever shattered emotionally by one of the last things that any child should bear witness to,

"Enter The Void" is easier to sit through than "Irreversible," but then again that's like saying "Requiem For A Dream" is an easier endurance test than sitting through "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (the original, not the generic Michael Bay-produced remake); there are more enjoyable moments, but there is still many intense emotional moments to endure along the way. That car crash where the parents are instantly killed is rendered in such vividly horrible fashion that I found myself wanting to look away. To see this close knit family get ripped apart so quickly was hard to watch, and maybe that's because we have a fairly good idea of where it will all lead to.

But at the same time, Gaspar does manage to counter many of the most disturbing moments of the movie with scenes of innocence and sweetness. This is an aspect to his filmmaking that most people don't ever seem to give him credit for. In the midst of shocking scenes filmed in all their psychologically damaging glory, he does capture lovely intimate moments between characters that I don't seen done as well in most movies these days. This was even the case in "Irreversible" when we watched Vincent Cassel and Monica Bellucci frolicking with one another in their apartment. The fact that the two are married in real life makes the scene even more truthful as a result.

As with your typical Gaspar Noe motion picture, it is easy to admire, not quite as easy to love, yet almost impossible to recommend to others. This is as far from mainstream cinema as you can get these days, and those who are easily offended (and that includes just about every other person I know) would do their best to keep a marathon-like distance away from "Enter The Void." There's even a scene where we watch helplessly as Linda gets an abortion, and although I was afraid it would be a much harder scene to sit through than it was, it is bound shake up a lot of the audience members who come to see it (even the ones who feel like they have seen everything). On the upside, there is nothing political about that moment. Of course, even if there was, it wouldn't have changed anyone's mind on the subject.

The acting in "Enter The Void" is for the most part good. Special praise should go out to Paz de la Huerta whose character of Linda has to go through the film's most viscerally emotional moments, and she portrays them without a hint of just playing the emotion and not the action. I also liked Cyril Roy as Oscar's mentor Alex and found him to be an enjoyable presence even in the film's more damning moments of despair. But let's be honest here, "Enter The Void" is a director's movie more than anything else, and this apparently was Gaspar's dream project for years and years. It's a movie for visual and sound designers to go nuts on, and they must have had a blast trying to bring the director's own drugged out visions to the silver screen.

At two and a half hours long, "Enter The Void" does get a bit tedious at times. When the movie ended and the lights came up, I heard one guy say:

"So at what point did you fall asleep?"

For some, this movie will be a hell of a lot longer than it should be. As for myself, the only time I got a bit restless was during the hotel orgy scene which overstays its welcome after not too long a time. Gaspar uses this scene to make clear the difference of having sex and making love, but he spends far too much energy filming this moment instead of just cutting down to its bare essence. I started to feel like Sean Young at the DGA awards a few years ago when she told "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" director Julian Schnabel to "get on with it."

Then there's that scene where we are inside Linda's privates as a phallus thrusts its way to orgasm and spurts it right into our face kind of like how John Waters did in "A Dirty Shame." Everyone in the theater including myself just howled with laughter at that moment, and it took us out of the moment for no particularly good reason. They should show that scene in health and sex education courses at high school. Of course, the laughter will get even more annoyingly hysterical when it reaches that point.

But in spite of that, I was completely mesmerized by "Enter The Void" from start to finish as it took me on a journey far different than most I have sat through at a movie theater or on DVD this year. It will surely go down as one of the definitive love-it or hate-it movies of 2010, but I have no problem standing up for what Gaspar Noe has accomplished even if it became a bit overindulgent. It held my attention as it made its way to a climax where we finally come to THE VOID. The lights come up and we are left in a daze as to what we just saw. I haven't seen an ending to a movie like that since "Apocalypse Now Redux."

Personally, I'm glad we have directors like Gaspar around today because it feels like cinema worldwide is lacking filmmakers who take risks and challenge the conventional structure of your typical corporate product posing as a movie. We need more directors like that now because it has become increasingly understandable as to why many no longer go out to the movies like they used to.

While I got seriously annoyed when someone opened the door in the theater, letting the wave of lobby lights pierce through our collective attention to what we were watching, I could never take my eyes off the screen. At least all my fellow audience members had the good thought to put their cell phones on silent mode. Now if other theatergoers would kindly follow suit...

**** out of ****