Gaspard Noe is stuck. Stuck with the label of enfant terrible, which he worked so diligently to obtain. Remember the facetious notice to sensitive viewers to leave the cinema in Seul Contre Tous, remember the 9-minute rape scene in Irreversible - he shocked the viewers, brought on a slew of insults but essentially, the shock and awe tactic was always a bit of a distraction, a sleigh of hand in a magician's repertoire.
Alas, it has now become clear that he has created his own "shocking" world in which he can become an utter conformist, reiterating ad nauseam his language composed of nouns of strobes and verbs of horror, with some adverbial dialogue, which only serves as a wiry skeleton on which the "shocking" can be spooned generously.
Oscar, a young drug-dealer living in Tokyo (apparently because his deceased parents were Japanophiles?) has a sister. They live in a small flat which opens onto, NO, is entered by the neon of the streets of Tokyo. He does acid, he does pills, coke, Tibetan mysticism, he does DMT and his friend's mother.
His sister Linda is a stripper, his friend Alex a (crap) painter living in a flat full of glow-in-the-dark trinkets. None of this is particularly important or interesting for the semblance of Plot on which Noe can live out his visual ambitions.
To put it short, the backbone of the film is a new age narrative with a few wikiFreudian elements (older lover=dead mother; oral drugs point at fixation with mother's breasts... Yawn.) While Irreversible dealt with male sexuality, vengeance, the cruelty of desire, Enter the Void deals with the banal.
To put it generously, it hinges on the creation of a "moment of death-tautology" (which Noe presumably read in wishy-washy Haruki Murakami, of all people!!), in which the recently deceased person's mind creates a mental loop in which the mind survives, fashioning it out of fragments of visual and philosophical bricks which are lying around the brain. So, Oscar creates his own Tokyo where he is a ghost stuck in this world (just as was foretold by Alex's explanation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead). Chekov's guns blazing, his fears and worries expressed while alive happen below, such as his sister's pregnancy, but Oscar has been reduced to a floating eye, unable to intervene and presumably suffering because of what he sees. The visuals here are indeed stunning and, apart from the superfluous strobing, testify to Noe's technical prowess.
The problem of course is, no one feels anything for Oscar, whose character is flat. The more we see of his childhood, his traumas and the events which led up to his death, the more distant we become. My suspicion is that Noe knows this, but the value of bad acting and a poor script being touted as cinema is debatable at best. The film that was meant to shock merely discomforts the viewer and leaves little in terms of legacy. Ultimately, Noe is a brilliant VJ, but I'm not convinced that's enough. I do agree with the New Yorker - stay at least for the credits.
