Enter the Void

(2009) director Gaspar Noé
viewed: 02/01/11

Mind-altering drugs?  How about a mind-altering film?

Gaspar Noé’s psychedelic fever dream of a film, Enter the Void, is a harrowing 2 and a half hour death trip.  Shot entirely from the first person perspective (the camera’s view is through the eyes of a young American drug dealer) in Tokyo.  If the effect wasn’t disorienting enough, he takes drugs, trips out, and then gets shot to death.  When he dies, his spirit, the camera view, becomes a drifting omniscience, following his friend and his younger sister in the wake of his demise.

It’s really unlike anything I’ve seen.  Noé claims inspiration from a viewing Robert Montgomery’s 1947 film noir The Lady in the Lake, which Noé watched while tripping on acid.  The Lady in the Lake also employed this unusual first person camera approach.  I guess the LSD did the rest.

Enter the Void is something far more experiential than gimmicky.  It’s epic in its breadth, flitting back through the young man’s childhood and his relationship with his sister, the beautiful Paz de la Huerta.   Orphaned at a young age, he feels that he is her protector, but he’s a drug-taking drug dealer and she works as a stripper in the luminous neon Tokyo.  And then there is that weird incestuousness angle.

The film is amazing, really.  It’s a visual masterpiece, and the strange interior perspective, the disembodied semi-consciousness, the helplessness in death of detachment from the world, it’s a dark and often disturbing flight.  As much as the film takes inspiration from The Lady in the Lake, it also channels a spiritual psychedelia akin to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and I’ll bet my bottom dollar that this film finds its place among the cult films of the world, with college students and bong hits and lots of other additives enhancing an experience, perhaps steps further on from Noé’s with Montgomery’s noir film.

I regret not having seen this one on the big screen, but as intense as it was, I don’t know if I’m too keen to sit through it again.  It was an endurance test of sorts, as beautifully rendered and amazingly hallucinogenic as it was, it’s not really a pleasure trip.  But it’s a really wild, amazing film.  Heavy, trippy, epic.