Director: Gaspar Noé
Writer: Gaspar Noé
Biographical note: I was ill in 2010. Much of that year I was paralyzed. I started this blog because I stopped sleeping and would stay up all night long, watching horror movies. One of those movies was Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void (original, 2010 post here). Noé provided a handy spoiler in his own movie when a character summarizes existence after death according to the Tibetan Book of the Dead as foreshadowing of what was to come next. Ten years later, in his 2018 film Climax, Noé provides no such road map, leaving the viewer to wander through his psychedelic maze with no directions other than their own. It was an intense trip.
Opening on pure white, snow-covered field, a blood soaked straggler marches across the screen until collapsing, presenting the audience with the first stroke on a blank canvas. Eschewing as many conventions as possible, a faux end credits sequence appears and the movie begins again with a series of audition tapes made by the dancers in the amazing first dance scene. At the end of their performance (in a single cut), they celebrate their creation in the studio where they have been rehearsing and living. The blank canvas quickly becomes painted with the colors of joy and happiness as the young dancers enjoy the fruits of their labor and their fellowship with each other.
Like a modern Tower of Babel, their pride in their creation quickly becomes confounded by a healthy dose of LSD surreptitiously added to the community bowl of sangria. The bonhomie of the opening scene quickly gets cast off as dancers begin to retreat from each other into their inner worlds. What they do to each other while on their trips quickly goes from careless to monstrous as the gulf between their souls widens.
Instead of being scattered to the ends of the Earth, they attack each other. As the film reaches its final act, a frightening journey into Hell complete with disfigured demons and a myriad of physical and psychological tortures, a title card reading "Life is a collective impossibility" appears on the screen. All of the joy the group felt in the beginning has been subverted into the worst horrors of each cast member.
Then mechanics of the film craft are truly extraordinary as the camera travels through the troupe, following one, then another in a series of long, single shots or floats above them while they dance. The film uses a bold color palette to mirror the intensity of the dancers trips. By then end of the movie, everything is either blood red or black. I will definitely be buying the blu-ray of this movie to watch it again.
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