Gasper Noé’s Enter the Void is destined to join the ranks of Pink Floyd’s the Wall, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Trainspotting as a go-to visual aid for casual substance users in dorm rooms across the globe. Perhaps it will prompt those same buzzed, perhaps straight and probably male viewers to muse on what happens to us after we die, or whether or not something akin to that great unknown can be experienced while under the influence, or if one can ever truly approximate either tripping or dying, or both, on film.
Noé attempts to address all of the above in a film that for all its formal experimentation is still something of a one-trick pony. Certainly, for a viewer whose chemistry had only been mildly spiked by two cups of coffee prior to a weekday morning screening, the results are far more exasperating than profound. The trick in question—aligning the camera with the first person perspective of the film’s protagonist—is actually not a new one, but Noé adds a twist about 20 minutes in.
After a flash-bang opening credit sequence, we are looking out at the flashing neon of Tokyo through the eyes of Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), a small-time drug dealer who lives with his sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta). When she heads off to the strip club where she go-go dances, Oscar lights up some DMT and we get to experience his hallucination—blossoming biomorphic structures that evoke crystals, neural pathways, and Ernst Haeckel’s engravings of deep sea fauna—in real time, making for one of Enter the Void’s most beautiful passages. Still high, Oscar heads to a club, incidentally called the Void, to do another deal only to realize too late that he’s been set-up by his customer, and is shot dead in the ensuing police raid.
At this point, Noé pulls his camera up from Oscar’s collapsed body, slowly draining of life, and the first person viewpoint becomes that of his spirit. Well, maybe. Certainly, Oscar’s subsequent trajectory is remarkably similar to the journey the soul undertakes in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, as tidily summed up by Oscar’s drug buddy just moments prior to his demise. And what a journey it is: Noé makes his camera/Oscar fly across Tokyo’s warren-like architecture and penetrate walls, travel back into Oscar’s past at random intervals, and even burrow down into other character’s heads so as to momentarily see through their eyes.
The vertiginous novelty of all of this otherworldly omniscience soon wears thin as it becomes clear over the ensuing two hours that while we hardly knew Oscar, there isn’t really that much to know. Much like Christopher Nolan, Noé is a filmmaker whose gifts as a technician can’t quite make up for his shortcomings as a storyteller. The child actors who play the younger Oscar and Linda in oft-repeated flashback sequences give more life and emotional nuance to the siblings and the traumatic events that bind them than either Brown or De la Huerta do, lobbing their lines like lead bricks. The adult Oscar and Linda are merely a means for Noé to showcase his ambitious, and sometimes beautiful, camerawork; they are not characters.
Likewise, the druggy, seedy demimonde of Tokyo’s seemingly endless nightlife that is Oscar and Linda’s playland, as well as their eventual limbo, is just so much titillating window dressing. But Noé has always been eager to unblinkingly linger on the unsavory, be it drug use, murder, rape, or incest. Thankfully, in Enter the Void this fascination is more puerile, as when Oscar inhabits the heads of men who are in flagranti with his sister, than irresponsible.
It is too small a grace, though, to completely save this long slog of the soul, a teenage boy’s wish-fulfillment vision of the hereafter that owes as much to Hustler as it does to Huxley. Enter at your own risk.
[Originally published on sf360.org]
