Enter the Void was not pornography. Probably
2.14.2011
What with all the books that I've been talking about, I wouldn't want anyone to think that we were all high brow cultural consumers. Oooooooh no. The 96 books that I read last year was duly overshadowed by the 125 DVDs that Netflix was kind enough to send to us. I would count up the streaming movies that we watched, but let's just say that it is fewer than the DVDs watched, but significantly more than zero. What can I say, we don't have cable.
Sometimes, the queue can be a bit of a mystery. Take last night for instance, we could have watched the Grammys and whored ourselves out to the Justin Biebers and Lady Gagas of the world. Instead, I wrenched control of the remote controls from my workaholic wife and popped in Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void. I can't say that I knew anything about the movie or what pushed me to put it on our queue and move it ahead of 223 other possibly decent films. I don't even know where I first heard about it, but let me provide you with the helpful blurb from the DVD sleeve:
Now, turn off your lights, turn your computer's volume up max, and pop this video up to full screen. These are the opening credits:
How far through did you make it? That's what I thought.
As for the rest of the movie? Well, I think that I would call it Lovely Bones meets Requiem for a Dream meets Showgirls. That covers most of the bases in what is a really long, bad trip. The trip being bad, not necessarily the move, necessarily.
About 90 minutes into the movie, as Lauren started to get uncomfortable, she asked if I thought that there was more screen time with or without ta-tas? You see such things as exposed breasts and foreign films make Lauren squirm because when her mother sat her down at age 10 for the birds and the bees it, quote, "wasn't very effective." I'm pretty sure that this explains a lot of things, but we're not here for a therapy session. By the time Lauren had packed up her laptop and moved away from the couch (minute 120 perhaps), I was pretty convinced that at the very least, there were more mammary glands on the cellulose than lines of dialogue. I don't even think that it is close. There is a lot of sex in the movie. And not like when Jake and Anne have their fun in "Love and Other Drugs," no. Noe really lets the camera linger in odd angles for extended coverage of dry-run baby-making.
Um, SPOILER ALERT. But really, nothing I say can truly spoil the experience of this movie.
And then we got to see an abortion. Again, we're not talking multi-camera cuts to get the sense of emotional turmoil surrounding an abortion, I'm saying you're sitting in the room watching an abortion. We had a healthy debate about the size of the removed fetus, but time and metaphors have only loose ties to reality in this epic, so let's call it dramatic license.
Oh yeah, and then we see some penis. Don't worry, it's not an angle that you would recognize as such. Because we are now sitting in a vagina watching the penis come at us like whack-a-mole and we're the mole. From this point, you probably know what comes next since we all saw "Miracle of Life" in high school. Or Look Who's Talking:
Having just finished Tino Balio's excellent examination "The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, 1946-1973" I am reminded that American's in my parent's generation flocked to foreign films because they could address and show all of the sex that American morals and production codes prohibited. It was a great time to be in America. Then Hollywood changed the rules to start making their own sexy films, and all of the independent arthouse theaters switched almost overnight to grindhouse porn purveyors.
As Lauren said after the conclusion of the film, "Paz de la Huerta was in that? She's in Boardwalk Empire."
As Wikipedia so adroitly conveys:
To conclude: What is pornography? What is good? What is art? I can't claim to know. If you have some thoughts on these subjects, I would love to hear them. As for Enter the Void, I suggest something very heavy and medicinal and solitude (to avoid the awkwardness of having to discuss the movie after or see the shame in another's eyes).
Sometimes, the queue can be a bit of a mystery. Take last night for instance, we could have watched the Grammys and whored ourselves out to the Justin Biebers and Lady Gagas of the world. Instead, I wrenched control of the remote controls from my workaholic wife and popped in Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void. I can't say that I knew anything about the movie or what pushed me to put it on our queue and move it ahead of 223 other possibly decent films. I don't even know where I first heard about it, but let me provide you with the helpful blurb from the DVD sleeve:
When Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), a foreign drug dealer living in Tokyo with his stripper sister, Linda (Paz de la Huerta), is fatally shot in a police raid, his spirit leaves his body in a hallucinatory odyssey that merges his past, present and future into a chaotic whole. This riveting third film from provocative French auteur Gaspar Noe screened in competition at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. Cyril Roy co-stars.In some confusion of foreign film making, the director decided to place the full credits at the start of the movie. Perhaps that is because Noe wasn't sure that most of his viewers would be survive the seizures brought about by the thumping techno and flashing lights that he used to call attention to the good people that created this beast of a movie. Did I mention that the running time came in at 161 minutes. For those of you whom math is not a strong suit, that translates to 2 hours and 41 minutes. Keep this fact in mind.
Now, turn off your lights, turn your computer's volume up max, and pop this video up to full screen. These are the opening credits:
How far through did you make it? That's what I thought.
As for the rest of the movie? Well, I think that I would call it Lovely Bones meets Requiem for a Dream meets Showgirls. That covers most of the bases in what is a really long, bad trip. The trip being bad, not necessarily the move, necessarily.
About 90 minutes into the movie, as Lauren started to get uncomfortable, she asked if I thought that there was more screen time with or without ta-tas? You see such things as exposed breasts and foreign films make Lauren squirm because when her mother sat her down at age 10 for the birds and the bees it, quote, "wasn't very effective." I'm pretty sure that this explains a lot of things, but we're not here for a therapy session. By the time Lauren had packed up her laptop and moved away from the couch (minute 120 perhaps), I was pretty convinced that at the very least, there were more mammary glands on the cellulose than lines of dialogue. I don't even think that it is close. There is a lot of sex in the movie. And not like when Jake and Anne have their fun in "Love and Other Drugs," no. Noe really lets the camera linger in odd angles for extended coverage of dry-run baby-making.
Um, SPOILER ALERT. But really, nothing I say can truly spoil the experience of this movie.
And then we got to see an abortion. Again, we're not talking multi-camera cuts to get the sense of emotional turmoil surrounding an abortion, I'm saying you're sitting in the room watching an abortion. We had a healthy debate about the size of the removed fetus, but time and metaphors have only loose ties to reality in this epic, so let's call it dramatic license.
Oh yeah, and then we see some penis. Don't worry, it's not an angle that you would recognize as such. Because we are now sitting in a vagina watching the penis come at us like whack-a-mole and we're the mole. From this point, you probably know what comes next since we all saw "Miracle of Life" in high school. Or Look Who's Talking:
Having just finished Tino Balio's excellent examination "The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, 1946-1973" I am reminded that American's in my parent's generation flocked to foreign films because they could address and show all of the sex that American morals and production codes prohibited. It was a great time to be in America. Then Hollywood changed the rules to start making their own sexy films, and all of the independent arthouse theaters switched almost overnight to grindhouse porn purveyors.
As Lauren said after the conclusion of the film, "Paz de la Huerta was in that? She's in Boardwalk Empire."
As Wikipedia so adroitly conveys:
Oscar hovers high above Tokyo and enters an airplane, where he sees his mother who breast-feeds a baby to whom she whispers Oscar's name. The view then drops to Linda and Alex who take a taxi to a Tokyo love hotel and have sex. Oscar moves between hotel rooms and observes several other couples also having sex in various positions. Each couple emanates a pulsating electric-like glow from their genitals. Oscar enters Alex' head and experiences having sex with his own sister. He then travels inside Linda's vagina to witness Alex' thrusting, then observes his ejaculation and follows the semen into the fertilisation of his sister's ovum.
The final scene is shot from the perspective of a baby being born to Oscar's mother. According to Gaspar Noé, it is left to the viewer to decide if this is a flashback to Oscar's birth, either genuinely or as a false memory, or if his life starts over again, trapping him in an infinite loop for all eternity.
To conclude: What is pornography? What is good? What is art? I can't claim to know. If you have some thoughts on these subjects, I would love to hear them. As for Enter the Void, I suggest something very heavy and medicinal and solitude (to avoid the awkwardness of having to discuss the movie after or see the shame in another's eyes).
