Lux Æterna (Gaspar Noé, 2019)

Following the critical and commercial success of Climax, Gaspar Noé did an odd thing. He accepted an assignment to produce a promotional film for Yves Saint Laurent. While I doubt that any working director short of George Lucas is ever in a position to turn down free money, it's unlikely that Noé really needed to accept this commission. Still, he was given complete freedom -- length, subject matter, formal approach -- so long as the final product featured a set of Saint Laurent dresses. The result, as it happens, is the director's best film since Irreversible, and the most accomplished cinematic "commercial" since the Schwechater brewery tapped Peter Kubelka to shoot a quick ad.

Lux Æterna is subversive in more ways than one. First of all, Noé made a much longer film than the fashion house ever expected. It's a medium-length "film essay," as Noé has called it, as as such, it's largely unsuitable for promotional purposes, or for theatrical release. Its 50-sum-odd minute run time (which includes a brief prologue involving the Passion Play) places the work in a kind of exhibition limbo, which is ironically apposite. This is a film about filmmaking as a kind of fiery hell, a machine that tortures bodies -- specifically women's bodies -- for the sake of art.

In addition to being a radical work of avant-garde (or at least avant-garde-adjacent) cinema, Lux Æterna is a film that completely alters our thinking about Noé and his primary concerns. He has been a filmmaker sometimes derided for his pretentions, partly because he often presented rather half-baked or jejune ideas with the utmost seriousness. With Climax we began to see Noé's more playful side. But I would submit that Lux Æterna is, in its way, as close to a screwball comedy as this director is liable to make. 

Beginning with a split-screen double shot of his two stars, Béatrice Dalle and Charlotte Gainsbourg, Noé introduces Lux Æterna as a series of trials and indignities that actresses must endure in the film industry. The two women discuss unpleasant shoots they've been on, and in the course of this conversation, Dalle's character (she is playing herself) admits to being a bit of a reconstructed Christian. "I ask God if what I'm doing is bad," she says. "If he doesn't say anything, I assume I'm okay."

Dalle is the director of the film-within-the-film, a scenario in which multiple women, including Gainsbourg, Stefania Cristian, and Clara 3000, are burned at the stake before a bloodthirsty crowd. But what we actually see is Dalle being beset by numerous complications and overt efforts to undermine her on-set authority. The producer (Félix Maritaud) is ranting about how he's going to lose money on Dalle's project, and he is working with the DP (Maxime Ruiz) to supplant her as director. Meanwhile, she is being second-guessed by nearly everyone on the production. Gainsbourg, meanwhile, is being harassed by a cocky young American filmmaker (Karl Glusman), and in the middle of the shoot, she receives some very disturbing news from home.

Lux Æterna partakes of a tradition that runs from 8 1/2 and Day For Night right up through David Mamet's State and Main and Youssef Chahine's Silence, We're Rolling and beyond: the film set as a space of semi-controlled chaos, wherein a director is struggling to navigate his art through a veritable circus of demands and distractions. For his part, Noé includes quotations from and homages to a selection of cinematic heroes, referred to by first name only: "Jean-Luc," "Rainer W.," "Lars," "Pier Paolo," and above all "Carl T.," whose Dies Irae is directly referenced, along with Benjamin Christensen's Haxan. If filmmaking is a kind of magic, then it obviously relies on witches, women who will inevitably be burned for their trouble.

The fact that he draws from an all-male pantheon is not lost on Noé. Lux Æterna is largely about the struggle that women face both in front of and behind the camera. Gradually, we see Dalle and Gainsbourg lose their composure and submit to the apparatus's relentless sexism. Dalle tries to issue commands, but the crew refuses to acknowledge her. Gainsbourg is tied to a stake and cannot break free, even as both the film itself and her personal life seem on the brink of collapse. 

In watching this film, it's impossible not to think about the torments to which he himself subjected his women collaborators, the most infamous being Monical Bellucci's devastating rape scene in Irreversible. It would be glib to simply call Lux Æterna a reposte to Noé's critics. Some writers have likened it to Lars von Trier's The House That Jack Built, as a winking self-indictment that ultimately shrugs its shoulders, as if to say "I am what I am." Lux Æterna is different. It not only makes explicit connections between women's abuse as actresses and as models, yoking YSL into his critique. It actually lays bare the fact that film history has depended on women -- their patience, their indulgence, and their humiliation -- to fulfill male fantasies. As the film within Lux Æterna breaks down, becoming an assaultive flicker film in the mode of Paul Sharits, it's like Gaspar exacting a bit of revenge. We are so used to enjoying the sight of women's bodies, but suddenly the film attacks us, nauseates us, effectively burning our eyeballs at the stake.