Enter The Void (2009)

When I say i've never a Gaspar Noé film before it feels like a guilty admission despite the fact, he's only made 3 films including this one and no one saw the first one outside of France. As have gathered, i'm uncomfortable with 'extreme' filmmakers like Noé and Miike but i got the feeling Enter The Void would be different than Irreversible so far as that film was about violence and this film is about death and reincarnation. I knew it would still be hard edged and viceral but then hopefully less hard going then his previous film and i surmise it is but probably not by much...
This film has titles sequence so intense I was worried it would make me epileptic. I'm not joking. I actually looked away and it's a fast-track introduction to Noé's concept of photography, where things are either shot in thumping strobe lights or dank underlit spaces, places I'd imagine were the hardest things to photograph like a nightclub. Nightclubs never look accurate on screen cos they're always overlit and I can only imagine how hard it was to do the lighting in this film so well to the extent that even I am talking about lighting.
But there's much more to Noé's etherial masterpiece than that. I think the highest complement, i want to give it is that it's extreme and intense without being repulsive (even though some of it is and only in very small doses). Enter The Void is like a (fantasy) Human Biology rollercoaster. In seriousness, easily-travelsick people should bring a sick bag since it takes place in the first-person and gets bumpy.
I'm not giving anything away when i say the main character dies. The way he does and since we're in this guy's body in an isolated space is completely claustrophobic and I felt like I was going to die to, and i'm not prone to claustrophobia or illusions of dying, even in my dreams.
So thanks for that, Gaspar Noé... i guess.
So as you may or may not know, this guy floats over the people he knows and has flashbacks to his life regarding his sister, his friends and parents, which sounds simple but his sister is a stripper in a gangster's bar, his friends are junkies or worse, artists and his parents died in a car crash. The protagonist is a drug dealer/user and as he's dying and looking back there's a remarkably achieved sense of watching cognisant hindsight and guilt; the most effective example for me being when he and his sister are being separated into care and she is pleading with him that he promised, they wouldn't be split but he's helpless; he is/was a child. As they grew up, his sister might not even remembered this or in that way but it's the feeling that it's never left that's rings so true for me. There's even repetition of these memories and i don't think a lot of films could get away with that, but 90% of the scenes or shots in this film are so dynamic you'd happily watch them again though I would say if you've seen the 160min-director's cut once, you've seen it twice. I can't say it's not too long, my perennial bug-bare, but it's only by a little and it has so much to say, so ambitious and successful in portraying things that are only cognisant in the mind- that it deserved more than the standard 100mins...

I watched Enter The Void (2009) on DVD, via LoveFilm.
My 2011 in Movies will return with Win Win (2011)...