Enter the Void

Enter the Void
Nathaniel Brown, Paz de la Huerta, Cyril Roy
Director: Gaspar Noe

From his first short, Carne (a 40-minute piece about a butcher plotting to avenge the rape of his autistic daughter), to the thriller Irreversible (with a notorious, seemingly never-ending tunnel rape scene) Gaspar Noe's films have always induced jubilation or revulsion. Indifference is not an option - and Enter the Void continues the French filmmaker's taste for the controversial.

The story itself is hardly extreme by Noe's standards, as it boils down to a tale about a young American man whose spirit zigzags between visions of the past and the present he's left behind after he's gunned down in a Tokyo club. What's astonishing is the way he articulates the premise with imagery which is as technologically inventive as it is deranged - what else can be said about a film with a shot which looks at penetration and ejaculation from within the human body?

For all the bared skin in the film Enter the Void hardly trades merely in erotic titillation. The sex here is just the manifestation of a near-Freudian dissection of the protagonist's subconscious. However No?might disagree that at its core this is a melodrama about a young man's somehow taboo-tainted yearning for intense familial ties.

The cornerstone for all the visual frenzy is the relationship between Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) and his sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta). He's a young man who peddles drugs in Tokyo for a living, income which allows him to bring Linda to Tokyo, where she becomes a stripper.

Framed by a friend, Oscar is killed in a police raid in a club called The Void. As he lies dying, the audience's hallucinatory trip begins in earnest, as Oscar's now out-of-body spirit travels wildly across time and space.