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Update on Friday in Cannes
This year’s Cannes Film Festival has been way above average, but on Friday, two days before the major awards, the movies took a turn for the worse.
See the earlier post about an 8:30 a.m. screening of “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus,” the last film of Heath Ledger. Not good.
Then comes “Enter the Void,” from Argentine/French director Gaspar Noe. In 2002, the director brought “Irreversible” to Cannes. And critics who walked out early (of which there were many) missed the movie’s touching, sympathetic ending, which made up for the brutality that preceded it (at least in my opinion).
So I was determined to stay through his latest movie as well. I sat through psychedelic visions of nothing but pulsing whiteness, yellowness, redness, blueness, presumably watching the action on screen from a young man who has been fatally shot to death in Tokyo but whose soul is still hovering over his loving sister.
Most critics stayed this time, and endured a journey an aborted fetus. We also watched the poor lead actress, Paz de la Huerta, in one topless scene after another. (She plays a Tokyo stripper, and even when she’s not stripping, she’s often topless, if not fully nude.)
And I could help but imagine how she felt during the gala screening. She and Noe and the rest of the cast and crew were sitting two rows away from me, in a packed audience of about 2,000.
Will Noe pull this movie out of the bag? Will he redeem the banality, the brutality, the drug-induced visions, the extended periods of nothingness? As it turns out, not really.
I suppose the last part of the movie can be seen as redemption, the never-ending quest for life. But did I really have to go inside a woman to witness the sex act and the fertilization of an egg? Noe apparently thinks so. Adventuresome moviegoers might be intrigued by such things. And I think artists should push boundaries. No problem there. See an earlier post about Lars Von Trier’s “Antichrist.” But this one isn’t worth the effort. And as a fan of “Irreversible,” that’s a huge letdown.
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