![]() To watch his films is to be made acutely aware of the cinema’s capacity to manipulate our experience of space and time. ![]() ![]() But in both films, Noé’s focus remains the same, his efforts aimed at conveying the sharp shock of having one’s habits unmoored from their usual spatio-temporal coordinates.Īcross Noé’s oeuvre, this manifests via a heightened formal immediacy. In terms of physical health, the elderly couple at the center of Vortex occupy the opposite end of the spectrum from Climax’s troupe of young dancers. Likewise, Climax (2018), which sees a dance rehearsal descend into an LSD-fueled freakout, conveys not just the dynamic possibilities of having a body, but also the terror that comes with losing control of it. His employment of stereoscopy in his much-derided 3-D porno Love (2015) expresses not just puerility or childishness, but how our binocular vision and depth perception are bound up with all the essential functions of self-preservation. Noé’s characteristically tacky way of putting all this is to dedicate Vortex “to all those whose brains will decompose before their hearts.” The line is in any case entirely in keeping with Noé’s methods, which have long been preoccupied not so much with the workings of the intellect, as with the endless enigmas of the body. (As many have observed, the dramatic setup recalls that of Michael Haneke’s 2012 film Amour, with Argento and Lebrun in the Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva roles.) What may initially have seemed like a dream becomes something more like Coleridge’s “nightmare life in death.” The remainder of the film’s 142 minutes is largely devoid of dramatic incident or narrative surprise, hardly deviating from depicting its central couple’s mundane activities and their slow, painful deterioration. As the couple goes about their day, we learn that Lebrun’s character, a former psychiatrist, is suffering from Alzheimer’s that Argento’s, a film journalist, has a heart condition and that neither is far from shuffling off this mortal coil. The latter soon awakes in distress, as if aware that a bold black line is at that very moment dropping down from the top edge of the frame, bisecting the film’s CinemaScope canvas into two roughly square images. Mortality on the mind, we are then presented with the names and birth years of the main cast, after which we transition to an overhead shot of Argento and Lebrun in bed. Giving us a presentiment of what is to come, a clip from Françoise Hardy’s “Mon amie la rose” plays on screen, its lyrics-originally a poem written in response to the death of actress Sylvia Lopez-expressing the transience of human life. “A dream within a dream,” he replies.Īs one might expect from the director of Irreversible (2002), however, the dream cannot last. For now, though, the serenity of the moment is all. Throughout the film, we will more than once be placed in a similar position, forced to reconsider our spatial coordinates. But when Argento and Lebrun’s characters (credited as “The Father” and “The Mother,” respectively) meet up a few seconds later and together head out onto a garden terrace for a cup of tea, we are led to abandon our initial assumption about how the space is put together. The images suggest two opposed apartments in neighboring buildings, calling to mind the spatial arrangement of Ernst Lubitsch’s So This Is Paris (1926). ![]() Enter the vortex art of illusion windows#The next two shots give us frames within frames: a pair of complementary views of windows directly opposite each other, through which an elderly couple (played by Françoise Lebrun, of The Mother and the Whore fame, and Italian master Dario Argento) exchange a few words. An opening-credits scroll gives way to a clear blue sky, from which the camera tilts down to survey a set of Parisian apartments. Vortex, Argentine-born French provocateur Gaspar Noé’s latest feature, opens in an atmosphere of rare calm. Color, French dialogue with English subtitles, 142 min. Produced by Edouard Weil, Vincent Maraval, and Brahim Cioua directed by Gaspar Noé screenplay by Gaspar Noé cinematography by Benoît Debie edited by Denis Bedlow and Noé sound by Ken Yasumoto starring Françoise Lebrun, Dario Argento, Alex Lutz, and Kylian Dheret. ![]()
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