Vortex
Gaspar Noé 2021 France/Belgium/Monaco
Starring: Dario Argento, Françoise Lebrun, Alex Lutz, Kylian Dheret
Gaspar Noé is a hard man to pin down. Other than his penchant for not so much challenging his audience as plunging them into a theatre of harmonic, sensory and literal brutality his films don't keep to a definable style. They shove, attack, fuck. His camera flies rather than hovers, spins and twists like the moment when you realise you've had too much to drink, he confronts us with images that horrify, arouse, disgust us (sometimes all at the same time) then he prolongs the terror, demands to know if we give in or why we have such an appetite for these pains. His viewers are voyeurs. He has been referred to as an enfant terrible although compared to others afforded the same mantle he's practically a demon. His 2009 Enter The Void immersed the watcher in the grubby psychotropic neon underworld of Tokyo to the level of intoxication then murdered its leading man and continued the film through the eyes of his spirit as it floated above his corpse, taking in and invading the city and those he may have loved; 2015's Love could at times be considered cruel pornography if it was at all arousing; 2018's subtly titled Climax took real-life dancers and recreated their rehearsals, interactions, flirtations, movements under the influence and bewilderment of surreptitiously spiked sangria; 2002's Irreversible, told in reverse and savage as a means of testing all and any limits available, meanwhile stands as one of only two films which have made me think not that "I don't want to watch this" or even that "I can't bear to watch this" but that "I shouldn't be watching this", something that would undoubtedly delight the provocateur-in-chief himself. Vortex is entirely different again, played as a traditional domestic drama examining an elderly couple whose lives, already enclosed by the spiky walls of books, scribblings and a cinephilia which feels closer to the tastes of a gentler Noé than anything we experience from them, inside their small apartment labour under the woman's increasing descent into dementia. It's as harrowing as his other work but in different ways entirely, the extremity replaced by emotion, the fear ferocity fucking traded in for a frightening humanity. The only abstraction is a single black line that dissects the screen in two almost immediately, both an invitation into the continued fracturing of mind, experience and relationship of the central pair, the images being shown from different angles and views, as if through the opposing sides of a barred window. Sometimes the two seem to connect, as if the characters and happenings are taking place side by side only for it to become gently obvious that they aren't, a hand leaving one window but not transferring to its neighbour. Again Noé challenges perception but with a subtlety and even maturity one wouldn't have thought him capable of and only in perhaps two short scenes does he break his new resolve and become the Noé we think we know. Michael Haneke's Amour has to be seen as an influence if not a direct predecessor but there's something darker here - Françoise Lebrun often commands the left side in a captivating portrait of disorientated anxiety, doing small things, trying to regain control of memories, feelings, abilities long lost. The Amour is still there, not least in the couple's relationship with the son whose lifelong mental health and impulse control issues have left him unable to become the parent they (and his own faintly destructive, neglected son) now need. In a stunningly fragile scene the woman (the couple are only named in the press notes) is able to overcome just enough of her confusion to comfort her son like the child he still is and he curls up with his head in her lap and his legs on hospital seats as she isn't quite able to understand who he is, just that he needs her. But there are also less desirable traits and feelings and there's a fascinating duality in the discussion of the committal of their then-teenage son to a hospital (not an "asylum") the man won't allow to reoccur for himself and his wife. The man himself is pleasingly multifaceted. Even before her illness is revealed he appears selfish, domineering, more than a little pompous but as time goes on it becomes obvious that it's his only method of coping and he is desperately balancing the care of his wife, his own flailing health and the compulsion to write, walking the increasingly threadbare tightrope often without the benefit of a safety net. Perhaps the film's strangest choice is the casting of the 81 year old master director of giallo horror (and questionably monstrous user of his own family) Dario Argento in the role of the man. It's not a jump to see him as a clear forerunner to Noé in attitude if not command of genre but he also plays it entirely straight and does commendably well in an incredibly giving performance, conveying his own cracking alongside the desires and needs he just can't shake off and his perhaps-faulty awareness that even as his wife loses her self he must retain his. I can't imagine where either will go next but I can't wait to find out because even in these later days neither has ever done anything like Vortex before and perhaps they won't again
