Friday, July 13, 2012

Enter the Void



A 2009 film by Gaspar Noe. Known for being shot from a first person point of view, head wobbling and blinking included. Then shot from a dead first person point of view.
Trippy cinematography. The whole movie's one long gorgeous bad acid trip. I had to finish it in two settings because I got motion-sick halfway through.

Plot:

It's an exploration of the seedy underbelly of Tokyo. Really pretty plotless. Some burnout kid from the states lands himself in the drug scene in Tokyo pretty deep and has half a mind to try to get out. His little sister's down on her luck and comes joins him. His friend pressures him into one last deal but it turns out to be a bust by the cops. In his hurry to destroy evidence he locks himself in a bathroom stall and takes half the pills while dumping the other down the toilet. He gets shot through the stall door in the stomach and drifts into a disembodied spirit. The rest of the film is a half death-vision half drug trip from bird's eye view.
He, or it, mostly haunts his sister. The girl falls into grief, then with the shady no-good characters he called his friends, who all wasted no time capitalizing on the naive young thing. Sex happens. Drugs happen. Drama and violence happen.
There's a short intersperse where he hallucinates that they somehow revived him, but he can't speak, can't do anything but blink while everyone treated him with disgust. Its implied he's back ala Frankenstein's monster style, an abomination that can barely quantify as living.
At the end of drifting, he enters into his sister's belly glowing in the middle of coitus (yes he watches his sister having sex) and is seen reborn as a baby. I took it as a happy ending.

Bird's eye view porn. Unusual I guess.

There are several interpretations of it. The director himself states that the whole thing's a hallucination of his drug addled brain in the few moments before total brain death. Time does get wonky when the brain's in a different state.

Notable scenes:

Scary as shit sudden flashbacks of when their parents died. Two little wailing children in the backseat staring at their dead parents' upside-down bloody mashed-up face inches away from their own. My gosh. If you had a mind of watching this movie while tripping on something, be careful of those scenes. They turn up unexpectedly and quite a few times.

 This film isn't about the dialogue.

What I liked:

All the rainbow neon love goodness. All the colors of the city night. 

<3



TL;DR

Seriously seriously beautiful and trippy movie. The tripping scenes and the shots of soft glowing neon Tokyo is enough to warrant a watch.




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