Climax (Gaspar Noé, 2018)

Goddamn you, Gaspar.

Your work is often so rife with childish ideas and cheap provocation, it can be exhausting trying to appreciate your singular formal precision. I mean, there's no one else making narrative cinema right now that comes close to your direct engagement with the psychotropic wing of the avant-garde. Malick and Godard cover their respective waterfronts (mythopoeticism and materialist montage), of course, but your work so often bypasses reason and hits the nervous system, the way Paul Sharits did, and reorients our understanding of film space like Ernie Gehr and Michael Snow. You've got the chops.

But sometimes the idiocy wins out. After I Stand Alone, which really was more Godardian by way of Marco Ferreri and Claude Faraldo, you hit your stride with Irreversible. I still get into arguments with folks about that one, defending your use of vulgar, cartoon violence and the perverse violation of Monica Bellucci and the audience. And yeah, "time destroys everything," not exactly the most profound insight, Gaspar. But that was never the point, was it? Irreversible is a film about trauma, how we want to take back little decisions that we superstitiously believe led to the big ones, and how we fixate on That Moment When Everything Changed. You didn't just make a film about that problem. You made a film that, within a strict set of formal controls, traumatized the viewer, gave him or her something they could never unsee. It took guts -- after all, that's where La Tenia lives. So you could be forgiven for putting your dumb 2001 poster in the film. In the context of such directorial brutality, such rookie errors were actually sweet.

But then, with Enter the Void, you self-consciously became the Bad Boy of French Cinema. As Bowie said, what a jolly boring thing to do. Drunk on the possibilities of CGI and now giving in to your most jejune concepts, you made a film that was all about the camera (or "camera") not as a material entity but as a gliding immaterial ghost. It could maneuver past the bouncer and into the club. It could go down toilets. It could enter a guy's nutsack and get ejaculated into a Pixar vagina. And for what? Some pseudo-spiritual hooey about reincarnation and incestuous love beyond the grave. Also, the rigor was out the window. Irreversible had relatively strict temporal parameters, but the fully apposite, unironically titled Into the Void could ramble on and on. It was less a movie than a notebook of half-formed ideas, your Southland Tales. Not nothing, but enough to make me think I was wrong about you. Awesome opening credits, though.

I was bummed, and, on advice of critics everywhere, I skipped Love 3D. It was childish of me, I know, and I will go back and watch it now. It just sounded like more of the same. The gaze is a dick, wind it up, watch it go, etc. But actually, you produced a major work just before that, a short film called Shoot. Commissioned not by FIFA, it seems, but some TV network adjacent to the World Cup, it was one of dozens of auteurist shorts dealing with football in some way. (Vincent Gallo's was memorable. In The United States Wins the World Cup, we just see the U.S. flag waving, and hear the national anthem.) Anyway, Shoot was a five-minute marvel, and I wish it were in circulation. It's one of the best things you've ever done. Your rolling, ducking camera is the soccer ball, getting kicked through the space of a shabby banlieue by some immigrant youths. Pure formalism, pure kineticism, in retrospect it seems like a dry run for Climax. After all, if you can incorporate les corps sportif into your films, why not dancers?

So yeah, Climax. Once again, Gaspar, I don't know what to do with you. Granted, when you decided to make a dance film, you didn't hold back. These are some of the most aggressive modern dancers imaginable, their collective style infused with hip-hop, breaking, krumping, voguing, contortion, and just about every rapid hand, arm, and limb gesture short of a grand mal seizure. Although we are clearly intended to read them as being an ensemble, there is a constant dance-battle electricity coursing through their every jerk and twitch, suggesting that they honed their craft in the streets and in the clubs, and that the (admittedly hapless) choreographer / ensemble leader Emmanuelle (Claude Gajan Maull) is just barely holding them together as a unit. This company is shattering entropy. They all want to fly apart into atomized individuals, or at the very least dyads and triads of young sexual bodies.

And for the most part, you stay out of their way. Shooting from above, you don't move the camera all that much. Your creative intervention is in casting and mise-en-scene. Oh yeah, casting. Remember how I chided you for your 2001 poster? Well, as if to deliver a lusty "fuck you" to everyone who (a) thinks you're stupid, or (b) thinks it's silly how you wear your influences on your sleeve, you first present the dancers via "audition tapes," on a television that is flanked by books and videotapes. Aw, how sweet, it's a few of Gaspar's favorite things! Why, there's a copy of Beyond Good and Evil! Check it out, he's got Salo and Kenneth Anger's Magick Lantern Cycle! And there's Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life. What a smart, well-read young man Gaspar Noé is! It's so ridiculous (and looks so much like the Oscilloscope website) that I can't even be mad at you, bruh.

What I can be mad about, or at least really annoyed by, is the lengthy section in the middle, before the drugs hit [SPOILER]. In shot after shot, we get what almost certainly must be semi-improvised dialogue from the dancers. It's excruciating, unless you find random horny party chatter exciting. And how would we? Since by this point (and arguably even by the end), none of these people are distinguished as characters, why would we be invested in who wants to fuck who, or this person's roommate drama, or that person's squeamishness about anal sex? Having spent a great deal of time with these people, it was probably easy for you to mistake this section for characterization, since you could hear some random meaningless snippet and think to yourself, "Oh! That's so Psyche!" or whatever. For the rest of us, though, it plays like bad blackout comedy, the world's randiest edition of "Laugh-In."

But hey, you recover quite nicely. As you probably know, film theorists like Carol Clover and Linda Williams have talked about how certain types of film -- comedy, horror, porn -- are "body genres," in the sense that they are designed to provoke a direct somatic response. Your work has always flirted with outright horror, but I must say, combining horror with the dance film is really quite a master stroke. Because when we watch the dancers at the height of their powers, in the first part of the film, I'd submit that we feel that in our bodies. Our muscles tense and relax sympathetically, we move slightly in our seats, and we are being moved by the images onscreen. 

So when those same movements turn sinister, as they do in the final third of Climax, you are taking us somewhere new, beyond conventional horror. It's a bit like the Rectum in Irreversible, another vision of Gaspar Hell, only this time not preposterous (or homophobic). Under the red light, with the screams of children and the battered and the disoriented and the sadistic, those same contortions that seemed so miraculous at the beginning of the film now feel literally diabolical, like bodies twisted out of shape through the torment of perdition. 

Narrative is out the window at this point, which is risky, because so many people will think that a particular character or event doesn't recur because you somehow forgot about it or were sloppy, when in fact, I see that you are following nightmare logic in the final act. We are lost and cannot get out. We are desperately looking for something we cannot find. Identity and time have broken down completely. And otherwise normal people are transmogrified into a bloodthirsty mob, themselves but "not themselves." As for the sangria, it was nice of you to give viewers a diegetic reason why things went down this way, but you and I both know it was unnecessary.

So yeah, you leave me in a muddle. Just when I was sure I was done with you, you pull Climax out of your ass. And even this has clear markers that you will probably never give up the smug, childish, self-aware reflexes that keep you from being a great artist. (Hell, the affectation of writing this review as a letter to you is probably why I'll never be a great critic.) But maybe being great isn't what it's all about. Maybe great works are, in Albert Serra's words, "unfuckable," impenetrable in some way, hard and gleaming, and you want to make films that have orifices, that piss and shit and bleed and can fuck and get fucked. 

I don't know. But I do know this. You clearly have a Kubrick fetish, and his works were as unfuckable as they come. Hard like obsidian, smooth like a monolith. Are you aiming to be the Kubrick That Fucks? If Irreversible was your shot at 2001, I think Climax may be your Shining, which occurred to me in the very final moments, as the fire brigade broke down the doors. I felt like I could imagine you, behind the camera, head bleeding, toasting their arrival. "Great party, isn't it?"