In the Flesh: Climax

Gaspar Noé's films always give the impression of trying to get closer to their subjects, of pressing up against skin and hair, of gripping warm flesh with rough fingers. Climax may not carry this as far in a literal sense as Enter the Void did with its warm, almost angelic interior depictions of penetration and ejaculation, but its grasp is if anything tighter and more intimate. It's a movie about isolation, about the essential incoherence of the human personality, and about how thin the barriers are between our own personal maelstroms of dysfunction and need.

The film takes place over the course of a single night at a French dance academy where choreographer Selva (Sofia Boutella) has just completed an intensive rehearsal with her new troupe. We meet each member of the troupe via tapes of their audition interviews, glimpsing the public faces they put on and the first traces of the neuroses and foibles beneath them before moving to their run-through of Selva's piece, a tangle of beautifully articulated limbs, flying hair, and muscles gliding under skin. None of the cliches of dance in film are present, no high-strung instructors insisting "again!" or anxious dancers melting down under the pressure of The Art. Instead, Noé's depictions of dance are thoughtfully studious, the film's soft lighting and roving camera giving us every possible angle, thoroughly canvasing the bodies of the expansive and charismatic cast.

When the ugliness starts--sparked by a massive dose of LSD in a bowl of sangria--it's almost unnoticeable, a smooth slide from shit-talking dancers grinning about unlubricated anal sex and revolving shots of show-offy solo dances into people wailing and pissing on the scuffed practice floor, grisly third-degree burns, and suicide. Noé uses the transition not just to highlight the film's shift in tone and style but to show the dark churn of emotion hiding behind Ivana's (Sharleen Temple) lonely sexual frustration, or David's (Romain Guillermic) misogynistic bragging about his conquests. The things these people feel toward one another are conflicting, intense, and ever-changing, no matter how banal.

After the acid does it work the film's camera transforms completely, emerging from its formal husk to lurch down neon-colored corridors and rush upside down between thrashing legs, giving us a glimpse of people clinging by their fingernails to the skin of reality. The soundscape goes from propulsive to overwhelming, a harrowing chorus of grief, lust, self-loathing, and madness filtered through DJ Daddy's (Kiddy Smile) pounding beats. Characters twist and contort in impossible tangles, gurgle laughter at each other's pain, and stare in terrified wonder at wallpaper, at their own hands. 

Climax is a trip into the underworld, a vibrant kaleidoscope of death and lunacy. Its connections are as electrifying as they are accidental, its resolution as numbly empty as the motives of the probable poisoner. Noé stays with each and every moment of his own film, hunting not for deeper meaning but for intensity, for emotions which flare and burn when we merge the flows of our public and private selves. When he finds it's cause to think that maybe nobody really knows anybody, that maybe that's the only way we can survive.