Et is a precious moment of peace that the spouses spend on their small balcony at the beginning. They have arranged to meet for an aperitif. The retired psychiatrist (Fraçoise Lebrun) and her husband (Dario Argento) contemplate the twilight of their long-serving happiness.
Life is a dream, she says cheerfully. As a film critic, he has a slightly different view; after all, he has been working on a book on the subject for a long time. With Edgar Allan Poe, he insists it’s a dream within a dream.
However, the idyll only has a short stay in the cinema. At some point during the ellipsis that Gaspar Noé places before the actual action begins, it came to an abrupt end. One morning she woke up in a world she no longer recognizes. Since then, her dementia has progressed rapidly.
Her moments of light are becoming increasingly rare; they are not predictable. The chores of their everyday life, to which the film patiently initiates its audience, have lost all matter of course. Home has become a minefield. A gas flame that is not switched off, the apartment door left open invite disaster.
Only a delicate routine still holds its own against the inevitable. Even before that, her apartment was a cramped labyrinth of bookshelves and other testimonies of a shared life as vigilant, committed left-wing intellectuals. Now it has turned into a tortuous cave through which she wanders with a lost gaze.
The disease does its work of destruction thoroughly. Living together has become a struggle with and against each other. He seeks refuge in another exhausted love. When the couple’s paths cross, they meet as strangers.
Intoxicated laboratory test of agony
Mindful, “Vortex” keeps a log of this nightmare within a nightmare. No moment is irrelevant to him, each one is worth telling. Gaspar Noé has armed himself for this with a quiet, tender perseverance that is bound to amaze. So far, this director has not attracted attention due to his restraint. Rather, he persistently sought out the scandal: as a rabid man in the director’s chair, whose cinema was an assault on the senses and intestines.
At the latest with “Irreversible” his work formed into a single intoxicating laboratory experiment of agony. It fueled the suspicion that he would not welcome the accumulation of catastrophes for dramaturgical reasons alone, but would also be fulfilling a nihilistic duty of care.
Films like “Climax” were impressive in that they made no effort to arouse sympathy for their stray characters. Hard to imagine that Noé’s heart beat for her. His never-ending tracking shots merged time and space into an infernal task that had to be endured.
“Vortex” is about family implosions. Noé’s new film was born out of an unprecedented, decidedly personal dismay: the gaping gap left in the filmmaker’s life by the death of his mother and a brain hemorrhage that he suffered in 2019 and that took him to his apartment before the first house arrest due to the pandemic tied.
The idea of casting director Dario Argento in his first film role underscores this biographical background: the indelible accent with which he speaks French reminded Noé of that of his Italo-Argentinian father.
Memory of the unleashing in the cinema
With a director who likes to quote like him (at the moment he is intensively reflecting on the image strategies of the Danish Protestant Carl Theodor Dreyer), it is not surprising that his two protagonists are also cast as cinema legends. Lebrun is a survivor of the claustrophobic room fights in Jean Eustache’s “The Mama and the Whore”. He also invokes Argento as a representative of the unleashing of cinema in the 1970s.
When he, as a husband, warns his wife about the outside world, which is full of dangers and terrible people, his work as a giallo director bears sufficient testimony to this. But that’s not the end of Noé’s curiosity about his actors.
He has let her largely improvise her scenes, confident that a chemistry of incompatibility will emerge from the collision of these different temperaments. The cast of Alex Lutz, who embodies her clueless son who is already overwhelmed by his own life, also plays into this bet with incongruity: he is a comedian by training.
“Vortex” thus marks a dazzling concession that does not compromise Noé’s unconditional will to style. The path that the former provocateur Francois Ozon has recently chosen – towards bourgeois maturity and a staging that carefully recedes behind the gravitas of the conflicts – is not open to him.
One could also say that he happily gambled away this opportunity: a director whose films have always been a slap in the face of convention no longer offers its safety net. He must find a more radical formal solution.
But cinema’s machinery of illusion is only of limited use in grasping this plunge into the unknown; This time, Noé also doesn’t want to fall back on his own version of the visionary, the hallucinatory. Instead, he describes the loss of reality by committing himself to realism.
Stations of the Cross in a split-screen marriage
Quelle: Rapid Eye Movies
This one has barbs. Noé films the couple’s Way of the Cross almost continuously using the split-screen method, which he previously experimented with somewhat coquettishly in “Lux Aeterna”. There is a tear through her life and the images that the film finds for it. At first it runs as a boundary line that separates the bed camp of the two. After that, they are hardly ever seen together in one shot.
Benoit Debie’s camera persistently follows them on their own paths. At times, the perspectives nestle together – never harmoniously, but always productively melancholy – but mostly stand against each other. The two image segments compete with each other by making different, opposing appeals to the audience. He has to make a choice about who to give his attention to.
It is unjust and simply impossible. It accompanies two solitudes that irrevocably lose their points of contact. Once there is a gratefully savored moment of understanding. But the heartbreaking point that Noé’s gaze leads to is the moment when one of the frames will be blank.