‘Enter The Void’ or — Wanking With Noe?
Gasper Noe’s ‘Enter the Void’ (2009) is daring, provocative and audacious… but then again, so is running about with your willy out.
Oscar is an American drug-dealer living in Tokyo with his sister. He loves DMT and reading The Tibetan Book of The Dead. He feels, looks and sounds like an extra from GTA game except with less depth. His friend Mario explains The Tibetan Book of the Dead to him, and us, one night then a drug meet goes wrong and Oscar is shot dead by police.
And that’s it, that’s the entire movie and everything that happens in it in one paragraph. We’re also only twenty minutes into an almost three hour movie. So what’s the other 2 hours and twenty minutes about? Like the Buddhist view of existence the answer is absolutely nothing. Defenders of the film will claim it’s about grief and trauma although whether it’s the grief and trauma of having to sit though this surprisingly dull film is still not clear.
And ‘Enter The Void’ is shockingly dull. For all the drugs, sex and visual spiritual pontificating the film manages, somehow, to be unsettling, over-stimulating and boring all at the same time. It’s kinda like what I can imagine being given a blow-job by Gerald Ford would be like.
Plus, for all its outre posturing (and this film has A LOT of posturing) it essentially feels like nothing more than a video game with video game camera-work and video-game characters. We start in the first-person view before changing to third-person over the shoulder until morphing into free-floating, theater camera mode. Combine that with a psychedelic colour-palette and a story flashing back to glimpse’s of Oscar life as a kid and it’s like ‘Far Cry 3’ directed by Terrence Malick.
This is also reveals the nihilistic, blank void at the heart of ‘Enter The Void’ because despite all the claims of touching on grief I suspect Noe doesn’t give a damn about any of that or any of his characters but, instead, sees trauma as something to be plundered and exploited simply to get his visual rocks off. You could switch the film off after Mario describes (in a scene of toe-curlingly adolescent philosophising) the meaning of Dharma and Bardo and nothing would be lost. All the film does after that is visually ram down our eye-throats everything Mario has just said in a style that is both tedious and impressive. This is not a subtle film in the slightest; it’s got heavier hands than Ian Fleming’s Dr No.
‘Enter The Void’ ends with a literal climax which is appropriate as this film is nothing more than a load of complete jizz. It says nothing and has nothing to say. It’s exploitative on MANY levels. It is repetitive to the point of topor. It is philosophically embarrassing. It reaches for the profound but ends up grasping the inane. The Tibetan philosophy of life is that death should be embraced as opposed to feared so I’ve learned something I guess because I think I’d rather kill myself than watch this fucking movie again.
Less a movie and more Gasper Noe running about with his willy out.
