BEING DEAD is intrinsically boring, yet there is some allure to the ghost’s-eye view of life in Gaspar (Irreversible) Noé’s humane if sometimes taxing Enter the Void. The film is not for the unprepared or the unimpaired; as they used to say during the Big War, smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em.
Enter the Void—a drive-in feature for Burning Man if ever there was one—unspools in a Day-Glo fake Tokyo synthesized from a computer program and a 3-D model, blazing with multicolored lights. It’s like the toy-city opening titles from Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood seen through a good dose of mushrooms.
The toy set is startling to those who know Noé’s works of hardened misanthropy like I Stand Alone or the backward-day rape/revenge opus Irreversible. Who would have guessed that when you gave Noé psychedelics, he turned into Michel Gondry?
Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) and Linda (Paz de la Huerta), an American brother and sister, are platonic other halves—so much so that the creepiness of potential incest hardly registers on the viewers. They’re essentially the only boy and girl in the world for each other; it’s almost as if they’re the innocent kids in The Blue Lagoon.
Orphaned and separated by tragedy, the two are reunited in Tokyo. They sink fast. She becomes a stripper and the lover of a yakuza. He goes from drug peddler to drug addict. They share a small apartment over a glitter gulch of Japanese neon.
In addition to the hothouse passion the two have for each other—as children they performed a blood-brother ritual, even while sharing the same blood already—they have succumbed to a greater ecstasy. Linda is so peaceful being nude she sometimes forgets, as when she has a nipple-slip incident at the apartment. When he’s stoned, Oscar sees a kind of heaven like glowing Chihuly blown-glass tendrils issuing from the light fixtures.
One night, the gaijin drug user is shot by the police in a bar called the Void. He dies in the men’s room, curled around the filthy vortex of a floor toilet. His spirit rises, and gets stuck fast between worlds in the bardo of illusions; for the rest of the movie, we see the movie from the POV of a camera, bumping softly on various ceilings like a lost balloon.
We know what’s up, because of earlier references to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a book Oscar was trying to crack. In sum, the text claims that a bewildered soul can’t leave our earth when it’s drawn to human passions and memories; such a lost soul will be challenged by demons along the way. Oscar’s spirit avoids love (or rather a building that says “Love Hotel”) in favor of those reliable distractors Sex, Power and Money, which is the name of the club where Linda dances. There’s sex also in the Love Hotel, where tantric ectoplasm curls like incense smoke between the grinding genitals of lovers.
A little of this Buddhist poetry is hypnotic. Noé gives us a lot of it, but he’s still all too terrestrial in his retro views of homosexuality—including a grody, playgroundish story about the way a gay male drug dealer brands his punks. His “child not a choice” bit about abortion, too, might well alienate the kind of audience that would ordinarily be prone to trip out over this cosmos. And the cheapness of animation is visible—and is sometimes risible, as in an instant of computer-animated coitus, seen head-on.
Despite the kaleidoscopic visuals, the simplest ideas work best. Take the Kodachrome views of Oscar’s idealized childhood, for example, in the form of the dead spirit’s thoughts of bathing as a baby. A crystal-palace of a pachinko parlor Oscar and Linda visit has the glittering charm of a carnival midway.
It took almost desperate sincerity to make this film work for as long as it does. Finally, though, technology trips up this filmmaker: the ability to go where he will, to return and reconnoiter. Noé gets so self-dazzled that he traps the viewer over a glowing Dinky Toy city, like a plane in a holding pattern.
Unrated, 160 min.
