Enter the Void (2009)

The setting is Roppongi, the neon-lit nightlife district of Tokyo, where gaijin drug dealer Oscar (newcomer Nathaniel Brown) shares a cramped studio apartment with his sister Linda (Boardwalk Empire's Paz de la Huerta), a topless dancer at a nearby club. The entire film is shown from Oscar's perspective—via first-person camerawork—so we rarely ever see his face. Rather, we see directly through his eyes—the image even "blinks" when Oscar does—a technique that's intimate and occasionally disorienting. After Linda leaves for work, Oscar sits down to blaze up some DMT, a drug that supposedly contains the same chemical that the brain releases at death. His vision floods with flickering lights and when he lays back and looks up, amorphous fractal-like patterns with pulsating, serpentine tendrils appear on the ceiling. This unsettling vision is interrupted by a phone call. It's Victor (Olly Alexander), one of Oscar's regular customers, who wants to meet at a bar called, yes, The Void, to make a deal. On his way over, Oscar is joined by his friend/mentor Alex (Cyril Roy), an artist who recently lent him a paperback copy of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Little does Oscar know that he'll soon become intimately acquainted with the book's precepts. When he enters the bar, he quickly realizes Victor has sold him out to the Japanese cops. Oscar barricades himself in the bar's dingy restroom and, to buy himself time to flush his drugs down the toilet, yells that he has a gun. Bad move. A bullet rips suddenly through his chest and he falls to the floor. His spirit, soul, consciousness—whatever you want to call it—rises up through the ceiling, looking down on what is now the husk of his body.

All this, mind you, occurs in the first 30 minutes of the 161-minute Director's Cut that we get here. (There's no option on the disc to view the shorter, 142-minute version.) For the remainder of the film, Oscar's spirit floats and flashes over Tokyo—using some devilishly complex crane shots —passing through buildings, peering down at the events unfolding below, and jumping back, not unlike Irreversible, to the lifelong series of turning points that led up to his death. Through these flash before your eyes sequences, a narrative slowly begins to emerge. We observe Oscar and Linda as kids, swearing a blood oath to never leave one another, and witness the jolting death of their parents in a head-on collision with an 18-wheeler. (An image Noé returns to often—and it's shocking every time.) In the more recent past, we see Oscar's descent into drug dealing and piece together the motivation for Victor's betrayal. At the core of the story, though, is the quasi-incestuous, mutually dependant relationship between Oscar and his sister, who seems so innocent upon arrival at Narita Airport—she carries a teddy bear around with her everywhere—but soon finds herself nuzzled up against the city's seamy underbelly, personified by her pimp/employer/lover Mario (Masato Tanno). When the film works its way back to the present, Oscar—or his soul, rather—fulfills his childhood promise by watching over Linda as she scrambles to survive in Tokyo after his death. I won't spoil the details of Oscar's inevitable reincarnation, except to say that it involves a series of erotic vignettes in a love hotel, Oscar mind-jacking his friend Alex mid-coitus with Linda, and an ejaculatory, never-before-seen money shot that intrepid porn producers will undoubtedly soon be trying to reproduce.

In the press kit for Enter the Void, Noé describes the film's central theme as the "sentimentality of mammals and the shimmering vacuity of human experience," a statement that seems entirely pompous but one that also provides a key for a more complete understanding of the director's bleakly existential intent. For Noé, The Void is life itself—not just the non-existent hereafter—and Oscar's out-of-body journey from death to reincarnation can be read as the split second delusion of a junkie, high off his own supply, facing the nothingness of what comes next. A harsh buzz, indeed. As for the "sentimentality of mammals," Noé fills his film with Freudian images of breasts—a symbol of human connectivity—from baby Oscar sucking at his mother's teat to Linda, hyper-sexualized, lounging around the apartment with no shirt on, flaunting what she's got in full view of her brother. (Between this and her sex-cat turn as Nucky Thompson's mistress in Boardwalk Empire, I feel like I'm strangely familiar with the details of Paz de la Huerta's anatomy.) Noé seems to be pointing out what he sees as the inherent sadness of how we attach significance to human connections that are essentially—in the long run—objectively meaningless. Sex, drugs, relationships…all are merely futile attempts to escape the looming threat of death.

Of course, Noé is not the first filmmaker to tackle this particular philosophical dilemma, but he is perhaps one of the most audacious, at least stylistically. (If not in content. I occasionally get the sense that Noé gets his own personal high off of being perceived as "shocking." Amongst all the full-on nudity and graphic sex, there's also a lingering view of an aborted fetus that will likely provoke a fight-or-flight response in viewers.) As an aesthetic experiment, Enter the Void is an unconventional and unsettling success. Other filmmakers have tried first-person narration before, but never to the extent or effectiveness with which it's used here. Although watching the film is an exhausting experience—this is a long 161 minutes of having your senses almost constantly assaulted—you emerge on the other side with the satisfying awareness that you've just seen something new. And that's a rare feeling when most movies at the multiplex are sequels, rehashes, or updates on old forms.