Your parents wouldn’t want you to see Enter the Void. And if you have kids, you probably will not want them to go.
But if you yourself are stoked for a lurid, oversexed, stupid-with-Freud Midnight Movie extravaganza – a trip to El Topo via Mulholland Drive – there are worse ways to spend 2 1/2 hours.
Made in Tokyo by a French filmmaker using breathtaking American fashion models – Nathaniel Brown and Paz de la Huerta – Enter the Void is the incestuous story of Oscar, a beautiful drug dealer, and his equally attractive roommate sister, Linda, a stripper who likes to practice at home.
The dealer Oscar (Brown), is his own best customer. His drug of choice is DMT, allegedly the chemical the brain produces when you die. A few minutes into the movie, Oscar gets a jolt of his own medicine when he’s shot in the chest by angry Japanese police: Off he soars into the past – like a kite with its line snapped – cavorting as a child with his beautiful naked mother in a bathtub, little sister right there beside him.
Fast forward: There is a grotesque car crash. Oscar’s parents are dead. That explains the 24-7 drugs, we presume. Fast forward (or maybe backward): Oscar and Linda wander Tokyo streets and nightclubs, muttering nervous, Dennis Hopper-ish soliloquies, yakking over a smeared psychedelic soundscape – what sounds like helicopters landing underwater or the racing heartbeats of animals fleeing a fire.
More primal therapy: Oscar in bed with someone’s beautiful mom, satisfying his mother fixation; then Oscar with Linda, dying, going back to the womb, searching for the light – yada, yada, yada.
Enter the Void is exactly the kind of film you’d expect from a filmmaker named Gaspar Noé (Irréversible): The film is by turns self-conscious, ludicrous, maddening and yet exhilarating – yes, there’s no getting around it, we can’t keep our eyes off the screen – exhilarating.
What keeps us interested, putting up with all the excess, is Noé’s sense of excitement holding a camera. Those swooning moments in Taxi Driver where director Martin Scorsese climbs high over the action in a crane, surveying crashing violence in a drugged euphoria? That’s right about the emotional plateau where Noé starts his story.
And there are great filmmaking sequences here: Floating tracking shots through the ceilings of neon-lit nightclubs and whorehouses, presumably from the point of view of Oscar’s Alex’s spirit chasing down his wandering, confused sister, that feel deliciously like out of body experiences.
Noé’s film is like an animal on the run. A strobe-light effect is in place through much of the film – edits that simulate a blinking, over-stimulated eye. What a pity, then, that the French filmmaker, a director with evident passion for his calling, has such little interest in his characters, who wander haphazardly about the screen, doing as they will. In the end, Linda’s journey makes about as much sense as a squirrel crossing a freeway at rush hour.
Not everyone will tolerate, much less enjoy Enter the Void. But anyone whose tastes in film are a little rococo – you know who you are – will likely get a lift out of the proceedings. Even then, it’s probably best to bring a lifeguard, a friend who will talk you down if you get too high.
