Enter The Void is the story of Oscar a late teens early twenty something drug dealer living in Tokyo. Oscar lives with his estranged sister Linda, after the two were orphaned by a car crash as children.
The film opens with some brief introductions, including introducing Oscar to his drug of choice DMT (which is described as being similar to the experience of death), of which Oscar has become obsessed since reading the Tibetan Book Of The Dead.
The interest in near death experience as "the ultimate trip" grows like so many of Oscars desires, fears, and fantasies from his parents death, an event which plays out again and again the film; as a traumatic scar that never closes, even in death.
After a six minute trip full of spiraling layers of shapes, patterns, and what look like deep sea fish in a fluorescent microscope, Oscar is abruptly shot to death in the bathroom of a bar called "The Void", whereupon his soul leaves his body floating sideways into the night sky, through walls, and even into other people's bodies.
The film is divided into four parts, the first Oscar's death told in 1st person pov, the second Oscar's life leading up to his death where we observe the back of Oscar's head within the frame, the third the lives of those affected by Oscar's death shown through over the shoulder ariel shots of Oscar's soul as it flys over the city, and the final a trip through the "Hotel Love" a partially imaginary place where all the film's characters have sex with each other in the various red tinted rooms while their genitals are surrounded by phosphorescent hallows of undulating color.
"Enter The Void" is a character study but one of a character who is at a point in his existence when "personality" simply is no longer an issue.
The second portion of the film showcases some of Gaspar Noe's talent as editor as it's essentially a sustained stream of conscious montage (like something you would find a New Wave film from Alain Resnais) creating a network of desires from Oscar's mother's death to his guilt over abandoning his sister, to an affair with an older women (which directly causes his eventual death), from the earliest notions of Freudian pleasure suckling at his mother's breast to his later day oral obsessive drug habit (smoking, pills, etc), his destruction is built into his desires and back again, many times over.
Noe goes through pains, some would say to the point of destroying the film with repetition to stress these points, as George Bataille transformed eggs and urine from emblems of his own traumatic childhood into obsessive erotic rituals for his character's to live out in his own French transgressive classic "Story Of The Eye", so does Noe reveal his wounded characters with reoccurring images of a car crashed and lips reaching for an exposed breast (If your recalling Cronenberg's "Crash" your not mistaken).
Some have accused the film and Noe of being obsessed with the ugly side of life; abortion, murder, drug use etc. And this would almost pass did the film not end in literal rebirth (certainly the most optimistic end of any Noe film so far). Likewise the film has been called "nihilistic", ignoring that the existence of the soul and reincarnation are tangible aspects of the plot, or that said "rebirth" taking place in the "love" hotel, where sex makes everyone glow like angels.
I suspect the mistaken attribution of nihilism to the film stems from this lack of any non-Earthbound transcendence. The same lust that lead Oscar to his death, lead his soul into a new body, and the Karmic keeps on-a-spinning with no end in sight.
Oscar spends most of the third acts trying to avoid floating into sources of light, which the camera is pulled into the way light is sucked into a black hole, the image warping and bulging at the seams as it descends.
There was a time when leading critics like Andrew Sarris considered Kubrick's "2001" little more than trumped up hippie freak out cinema.
Ask yourself if it's vague ideas about human transformation and evolution wrapped in the Star-child; a fetus in the empty womb of space or it's ten minute psychedelic worm hole, are any more ridiculous than glowing sex angels and a water wall of ejaculate.
ETV is the kind of film you cannot be impartial to, it makes demands and challenges on the viewer. For anyone to not be impressed with its cinematography, editing, sound, and special effects they would either have to be disingenuous or incredibly narrow in their tastes. The psychological underpinnings of Oscar's motivations are repeated so many times, I'm almost lost for words when I read critics describe the film as incomprehensible.
By comparison to his previous films which featured 10 minute anal rape scenes, some unmanifested Oedipal desires in EVT are like a breath of fresh air in the sweatiest dankest leather gimp outfit.
EVT is less a surrealist film as it is neo-realism taken to its logical extreme where the interior geography of the subject is as meticulously recorded as his external environment.
"Enter The Void" may wear the temporal skin of a drug film, but beneath the veneer of fear and loathing, is a soul searing with inventive cinematic flair and a desire to push towards the limits of an art form, eroding boundaries between mental states as it straddles genre lines between psychedelic ghost story and perverse love story like "Wings Of Desire" hovering on the painted clouds of Stan Brakhage.
The void is full of wonders.
The film opens with some brief introductions, including introducing Oscar to his drug of choice DMT (which is described as being similar to the experience of death), of which Oscar has become obsessed since reading the Tibetan Book Of The Dead.
The interest in near death experience as "the ultimate trip" grows like so many of Oscars desires, fears, and fantasies from his parents death, an event which plays out again and again the film; as a traumatic scar that never closes, even in death.
After a six minute trip full of spiraling layers of shapes, patterns, and what look like deep sea fish in a fluorescent microscope, Oscar is abruptly shot to death in the bathroom of a bar called "The Void", whereupon his soul leaves his body floating sideways into the night sky, through walls, and even into other people's bodies.
The film is divided into four parts, the first Oscar's death told in 1st person pov, the second Oscar's life leading up to his death where we observe the back of Oscar's head within the frame, the third the lives of those affected by Oscar's death shown through over the shoulder ariel shots of Oscar's soul as it flys over the city, and the final a trip through the "Hotel Love" a partially imaginary place where all the film's characters have sex with each other in the various red tinted rooms while their genitals are surrounded by phosphorescent hallows of undulating color.
"Enter The Void" is a character study but one of a character who is at a point in his existence when "personality" simply is no longer an issue.
The second portion of the film showcases some of Gaspar Noe's talent as editor as it's essentially a sustained stream of conscious montage (like something you would find a New Wave film from Alain Resnais) creating a network of desires from Oscar's mother's death to his guilt over abandoning his sister, to an affair with an older women (which directly causes his eventual death), from the earliest notions of Freudian pleasure suckling at his mother's breast to his later day oral obsessive drug habit (smoking, pills, etc), his destruction is built into his desires and back again, many times over.
Noe goes through pains, some would say to the point of destroying the film with repetition to stress these points, as George Bataille transformed eggs and urine from emblems of his own traumatic childhood into obsessive erotic rituals for his character's to live out in his own French transgressive classic "Story Of The Eye", so does Noe reveal his wounded characters with reoccurring images of a car crashed and lips reaching for an exposed breast (If your recalling Cronenberg's "Crash" your not mistaken).
Some have accused the film and Noe of being obsessed with the ugly side of life; abortion, murder, drug use etc. And this would almost pass did the film not end in literal rebirth (certainly the most optimistic end of any Noe film so far). Likewise the film has been called "nihilistic", ignoring that the existence of the soul and reincarnation are tangible aspects of the plot, or that said "rebirth" taking place in the "love" hotel, where sex makes everyone glow like angels.
I suspect the mistaken attribution of nihilism to the film stems from this lack of any non-Earthbound transcendence. The same lust that lead Oscar to his death, lead his soul into a new body, and the Karmic keeps on-a-spinning with no end in sight.
Oscar spends most of the third acts trying to avoid floating into sources of light, which the camera is pulled into the way light is sucked into a black hole, the image warping and bulging at the seams as it descends.
There was a time when leading critics like Andrew Sarris considered Kubrick's "2001" little more than trumped up hippie freak out cinema.
Ask yourself if it's vague ideas about human transformation and evolution wrapped in the Star-child; a fetus in the empty womb of space or it's ten minute psychedelic worm hole, are any more ridiculous than glowing sex angels and a water wall of ejaculate.
ETV is the kind of film you cannot be impartial to, it makes demands and challenges on the viewer. For anyone to not be impressed with its cinematography, editing, sound, and special effects they would either have to be disingenuous or incredibly narrow in their tastes. The psychological underpinnings of Oscar's motivations are repeated so many times, I'm almost lost for words when I read critics describe the film as incomprehensible.
By comparison to his previous films which featured 10 minute anal rape scenes, some unmanifested Oedipal desires in EVT are like a breath of fresh air in the sweatiest dankest leather gimp outfit.
EVT is less a surrealist film as it is neo-realism taken to its logical extreme where the interior geography of the subject is as meticulously recorded as his external environment.
"Enter The Void" may wear the temporal skin of a drug film, but beneath the veneer of fear and loathing, is a soul searing with inventive cinematic flair and a desire to push towards the limits of an art form, eroding boundaries between mental states as it straddles genre lines between psychedelic ghost story and perverse love story like "Wings Of Desire" hovering on the painted clouds of Stan Brakhage.
The void is full of wonders.