Needs editing. Maybe not. Repetition. Uncomfortable. Attention span assaulted. Myopic. Should have been high. Need to meditate regularly. She has a nice body. He's in a tray. Need to walk. A long walk. Perfect. An ant. Yes. An ant. Enjoy.
Chris Cabin at Film Critic:
At its core, Gaspar Noé's Enter the Void hinges on an oddly sentimental journey. Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), a young French drug enthusiast and sometimes dealer, is shot and killed by Tokyo police officers during a sting operation. For the rest of the film, clocking in just a little over 150 minutes, Oscar floats in a limbo state, floating above and through the walls of Tokyo's pop playground to keep an eye on his one true love: Linda (Paz de la Huerta), his younger sister. Experienced largely from the first person view, Oscar's drift through oblivion is punctuated by scenes, both extended and abridged, from Oscar's past that come rushing in with breathless urgency.
No one familiar with Noé, however, will be surprised at the violent, psychotropic and highly erotic visual abyss constructed from the script that the Argentinian-born French filmmaker co-wrote with Lucile Hadzihalilovic, his wife and erstwhile editor. But whereas his two previous features were based in a particularly bleak quasi-reality, Enter the Void submerges the viewer in a drug-addled afterlife, marked by Noé's dazzling aesthetic and Ken Yasumoto's bold sound design. And yet, for its seemingly never-ending sinful indulgences, Enter the Void touches on something deeply emotional, even beautiful.
Though originally conceived, as Noé has said, upon a viewing of the 1940s noir Lady of the Lake while tripping on mushrooms, Enter the Void isn't all blissed-out visions of city models that glow neon, de la Huerta's writhing body and heartwarming nostalgia. The car crash that killed Oscar and Linda's parents is repeated three separate times and the audience witness Oscar's bloody demise in a dingy bathroom through his eyes. We are also privy to pulsating hallucinatory graphics, Linda's explicit rendezvous with her gangster boyfriend and, for the capper, an up-close-and-personal view of the tip of a CGI-rendered penis as it thrusts and explodes towards the screen in a moment that both parodies and begs for the 3D treatment.
Indeed, it has even been suggested that said phallus serves as an allegory for the Lumière brothers' Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, another monumental moment of conception. Its not a completely ludicrous idea and, to be fair, the sheer abandon and unrestricted structure of Enter the Void lends itself to open readings, even if most of the subsequent "meanings" end up being more curious than actually insightful. In fact, none of the conclusions are particularly mind-bending, save a foreshadowing salvo on DMT, but they garner narrative fascination to match Noé's undeniable technical accomplishments.
Loosely based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the film concludes with Oscar's supposed rebirth by his own sister, his drugged-out buddy, Alex (Cyril Roy), now the acting paterfamilias. As ridiculous as it seems at times, from the opening blast of neon signs flashing the title in epileptic fits on, Enter the Void ultimately has something of a hopeful disposition and a belief in rebirth, though certainly the fact that Oscar's return to the womb comes with the stipulation that it belongs to his younger sister calls this optimism into question. Noé's phosphorescent mess sets out to elicit a genuine emotional response from an experiential deluge of both the sacred and the profane and the audience's reactions will undoubtedly be polarized. But for this viewer, after two viewings of Noé's singular feat, the results remain transfixing and not easily dismissed.
DVD Technical Information:
Title: Enter the Void
Year: 2010
Country: France
Director: Gaspar Noé
Source: Non-Retail DVD 9
DVD Format: PAL
Container: VIDEO_TS
Size: 5.39 GB
Length: 2:34:39
Programs used: Unknown
Resolution: 720x576
Aspect Ratio: 16:9 letterboxed
Video: MPEG2 @ ~5600 kb/s
Frame Rate: 25 fps
Audio: English- Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: None
Menu: None
Video: Untouched
DVD Extras: None
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BluRay Rip Technical Information:
Title: Enter the Void
Year: 2010
Country: France
Director: Gaspar Noé
Source: BluRay Retail
Video Codec: 720p-x264
Container: .mkv
Size: 6.55 GB
Length: 2:41:16
Programs used: Uknown
Resolution: 1280x544
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
Video: AVC H264 @ ~5500 kb/s
Frame Rate: 23.97 fps
Audio: English- DTS 5.1 @ 1536 kb/s
Subtitles: None
Thanks to Refined for the original upload!
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