Where & When: Arclight Cinemas, Hollywood, CA. March 3, 2019 5:15 PM
Much like his Danish film making counterpart, Lars von Trier, Gaspar Noé delights in shocking and agitating with his cinema. Born in Argentina but raised mostly in France, the filmmaker seems to get great pleasure with assaulting his potential audience with harsh, cruel and ugly subject matter, gleefully provoking a reaction of discomfort and unease. Noé's dark world view may be calculated and, at times, ridiculously excessive yet there is no denying that he also manages to make his films impressively stylish and disturbingly entertaining.
Noé has only made five features to date and they are all challenging and confrontational works. His first feature in 1998, "I Stand Alone (Seul contre tous)" deals with several days in the tragic life of an sad, isolated butcher which includes incest with his daughter. Noé's next film was probably his most controversial, "Irréversible" which tells it's story in reverse and follows a Parisian man seeking to avenge his girlfriend who was brutally raped with this act horrifically displayed in a ten-minute long take. "Enter The Void" is about an American drug dealer shot by the Tokyo police and we follow his wild and trippy, out-of-body experience as he reviews his life. And then there was his 3D erotic drama from 2015, "Love" which had his actors performing unsimulated hardcore sex.
His latest, "Climax" begins deceptively as a joyous and thrilling celebration of dance before descending in to a dark and unsettling nightmare involving violence and death between a group of dancers. And like Noé's previous works, this film delivers moments that are often wildly exhilarating while others are extremely distressing.
We are first introduced to these young dancers through video interviews as they audition for a part in a major dance production that will travel through France and the U.S. These performers are made up of an almost equal number of males and females, largely black and brown. Then the film whirls in to an electrifying five-minute long dance routine which shows off each dancer's individual style while they also work together in synchronized motion. This fast-moving, freestyle number (that is actually choreographed by Nina McNeely) set to Cerrone's 1977 disco classic, "Supernature" is the highlight of the film and almost worth the price of admission alone.
But "Climax" is a movie and there is something resembling a plot yet it's admittedly slight. After coming to the end of a long rehearsal, the dancers decide to cut loose and celebrate. While drinking sangria, they flirt, share personal stories and gossip about each other. However, everyone that drank the wine soon begins to feel strange and eventually suspect that it's been spiked with a hallucinogenic drug.
The dancers start behaving more irrationally, accusing Omar (Adrien Sissoko) of drugging them because he didn't drink. Although the reason is because he's Muslim, the group doesn't care and throw him out of the building in to the freezing cold. Once the drug really kicks in, we see these dancers wildly hallucinate and thrash about helplessly as they lose complete control of their minds and bodies.
Since there isn't much to the story, Noé plays with structure as a way to continuously throw off our expectations. "Climax" begins with the ending scene followed by the closing credits and the cast and above-the-line crew credits flash in the middle of the film. With his long-time cinematographer, Benoît Debie and Denis Bedlow, who edited with Noé, the director creates further disorientation with off-kilter shots, harsh lighting and lengthy takes.
And Noé is not satisfied with us simply watching the harrowing ordeal these young adults face and decides to push the boundaries further by introducing an adorable young boy in to this situation. Tito (played by Vince Galliot Cumant) is the son of Emmanuelle (Claude Gajan Maull), the tour manager and after discovering he drank some of the sangria, she locks him in an electrical closet for protection. But she had the wine too and her losing the key leads to tragic results.
Most of the cast are professional dancers who are acting for the first time. A familiar face is Sofia Boutella, a former model and street dancer turned actress who you might recall seeing in "The Mummy", "Kingsman: The Secret Service" and "Atomic Blonde", that appears here as Selva, the show's choreographer. With her character as our central figure, the actress is quite effective as Selva plummets wildly to the point of psychosis, lost in an erratic dance she can no longer control.
As we watch the drugged dancers reach a frenzied crescendo, some of this troubling action becomes very repetitive. But Noé is not motivated nor particularly concerned with pleasing a wide audience. And it’s been said that the idea of him winning a popularity contest of an award (which he won the Art Cinema Prize at last year’s Cannes fest for this film) has left him gagging.
Gaspar Noé has fearlessly shared his lurid concepts and horrid fantasies with the focus of his film not in it's story but more about creating frantic movement and stirring unsettling emotions. "Climax" is a horror film in the true sense of the word and this inventive director has crafted his vision of what that might be.
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