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| Courtesy of Utopia |
In 2009, Argentinian-French provocateur Gaspar Noe took
audiences with his first English language picture into a journey towards death from
the point of view of what a lifeless spirit might see when leaving the body in
a psychedelic hyperkinetic cinematic provocation called Enter the Void. One of many films that dealt with the
afterlife while also continuing down the director’s pot stirring path of
upending audience expectations by testing their tolerance for visceral sensory
assault, the film is a hardcore audiovisual freefall into sex, drugs, death and
rebirth that seemed to cement the filmmaker’s final word on the process of
dying.
Circa 2020 after three more feature film productions which
followed including Climax and his short split-screen feature Lux
Æterna, Gaspar Noe suffered a near fatal brain
hemorrhage which upon recovery seemed to upend and transform the director’s own
perspective on the fragility of life.
Arguably scaring the director straight, Noe all but wiped the slate
clean with what is pretty clearly his most mature artistic, cinematic and
personal expression to date, a sobering look the process of aging and dying
called Vortex. For once, French
cinema’s so-called enfant terrible looked inward and didn’t embark on a project
designed to shock and horrify. Instead,
it is a raw, saddening but ultimately sobering look at what to prepare for when
our own final days near themselves.
Starring legendary Italian horror film director Dario
Argento in his first (and last) acting role in a film alongside veteran French
actress Françoise Lebrun, the film concerns a nameless elderly couple consisting
of a professorial film writer living with his psychiatrist wife enjoying their
final years in tranquility inside their cramped but cozy flat. Soon the wife begins wandering the grocery
store aisles endlessly while her husband desperately searches to find her as
her mental health progressively worsens.
Meanwhile their grown son played by Alex Lutz is fraught with his own
personal problems while trying to help lend a hand to what is shaping up to be
a sinking ship threatening to take the couple down together.
The first thing
one notices as Vortex unfolds are the screen proportions lensed by Noe’s
right hand man Benoit Debie in soft but painterly detail. Beginning in 1.33:1 fullscreen with the image
posited at the center of the screen, the film soon splits into two separate
fullscreen images at opposite sides of the 2.35:1 widescreen frame, following
Argento and Lebrun separately on their day-to-day routines in real time though
each screen is either edited differently or they appear to mirror each other. At times too one screen on the left or the
right goes out, leaving audiences to deal with a blank spot on the image. That the entirety of the film plays with
split screen in this way makes the film an ever subtly disorienting
experience.
As always, the echospheric
soundscapes rendered by Noe intended for theater sound playback are dense and
adorned with a tracklist of popular preexisting tunes. What’s most striking of all about Vortex is
what it doesn’t have in a Noe film for a change. No sex, no violence, no swearing, and subtle
drug references. The racy provocateur
who seemed determined with his other movies to get an X rating including but
not limited to the obligatory inclusion of unsimulated sexual content serves
forth debatably his very first PG-13 film production this time around. The shock in this being that there is no
shock, only the sad dread of inevitability and aftermath which follows an
elderly person reaching the end of their timeline.
Dario Argento has
never acted before though he’s directed many an actor over the course of his
prolific career in giallo horror fare and though Noe and fellow European
provocateur Nicolas Winding Refn started hanging out as a bad boy trio, the
Italian legend’s participation in the project seemed like stunt casting. That is until you see him move about
naturally onscreen, speaking French fluently while carrying on a nagging cough
that worsens into heavy wheezing over the course of the movie. Gentlemanly and aristocratic while not afraid
to show off his aged wrinkles in a momentary shower sequence that ends in
disaster when his wife “cleans” his papers, Argento’s performance is at once
revealing and perfectly appropriate for the dark and foreboding journey this
film would take its characters and audiences down.
The one who does all
of the hardest of heavy lifting in the picture no doubt is Françoise Lebrun who
begins as a cheery and intelligent lady of equal to her husband’s success who
freely continues to write prescriptions for her patients as her own mental
health begins to deteriorate. Seeing Lebrun
pacing back and forth down grocery store hallways looking for…something,
anything for, who, what, where, when, why?
In her face all of those points of confusion play out with her in midstep
as her husband desperately tries to control an unfolding natural disaster he’s
ill equipped to contain. Lebrun’s wandering
eyes and blank face interspersed with random bursts into crying fits as she
forgets her husband and son’s own name while forgetting her own home plays out
with raw yet understated power, going for how something like this would really
affect elders rather than going for bombastic “performances”.
Shaping up for
many to be the most well received and critically acclaimed picture of Gaspar
Noe’s career and his only picture that doesn’t lean on extremity and screams,
going for subtler but more deeply affecting notes, Vortex is a quiet yet
relentless journey into senility and death reminiscent of Amour and the
recently released Oscar winner The Father.
Still, while those films tended to sadden or
disturb, Vortex comes as an expression of wisdom about the unforgiving,
unfeeling, unthinking nature of deterioration and death that isn’t morbid about
it but instead tells the plain cold truth in all of its matter-of-fact banality
whether we want to be there or not. Noe’s
still dark and foreboding but he does so from an unexpectedly unextreme and
therefore more profoundly powerful angle than he’s done in the past. An unhappy, distressing but in the end
rewarding cinematic experience delivered by one of modern cinema’s most
underrated and innovative storytellers.
--Andrew Kotwicki
