Enter the Void (2009) - Noé's Tokyo-set, visually magical bad trip

♥♥♥

 

A trippy, psychedelic poster for Gaspar Noé's Enter the Void

The first part of Enter the Void is seen through the eyes of protagonist drug dealer Lucas', as he takes drugs SPOILER and gets shot dead in the toilet of a Tokyo nightclub. The rest of the film consists of a lot of memories that relate the story of Lucas and his little sister Linda's lives, which is violently tragic, and since of the drifting around of Lucas' consciousness or soul in the Japanese mega-city, while the rest of his environment falls apart.

Enter the Void is the 3rd movie from Argentinian master co-writer-director Gaspar Noé (Irreversible (2002)), co-writen with Lucile Hadzihalilovic (Innocence (2004)) and shot by cinematographer Benoît Debie (Get the Gringo/How I Spent My Summer Vacation (2012)).
With Enter the Void, Noé comes across visually as something of a super-human wizard, and so much the worse, more anxiety-provoking and traumatizing is the experience of watching this in every sense extreme film. Enter the Void is terrible to watch and completely unforgettable at once, - it feels like a very long journey on a very bad trip.

 

Watch a trailer for the film here

 

Cost: 12.38 mil. €, equal to approximately 13.23 mil. $

Box office: Reportedly 1.4 mil. $

= Box office disaster

[Enter the Void premiered May 22 (Cannes, in an unfinished cut) and runs 143 minutes in its international version and 161 minutes in its extended version. Noé had developed the narrative since watching Lady in the Lake (1947), also shot from the a person's perspective, as a youth, high on mushrooms. He had tried to make it for almost a decade, but it was too expensive and risky for anyone to be willing to fund it, - until Irreversible turned out a hit. Noé has since called Irreversible, his masterpiece, a 'bank robbery' and a helpful exercise for him in order to make Enter the Void. Paz de la Huerta (Boardwalk Empire (2010-11)) is the only one of the main actors who was already a professional actor. The visualization of the film was much dependent on Noé's own experiences taking hallucinogenic drugs. Financing proved possible as a co-production of no less than 13 companies and governmental support funds. Filming took place from October - December 2007 in Tokyo, with additional shoots in Montreal in April - May 2008. Very little of the film's dialog was reportedly scripted. The producers made agreements with the Yakuza (Japanese mob) for its Japanese shoot. Complex crane shots, helicopter shooting and shooting in huge sets of the city made at Toho Studios were accomplished, and every shot in the film uses CGI. - Post production lasted over a year. Noé has explained about the film: "The whole movie is a dream of someone who read The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and heard about it before being shot by a gun. It's not the story of someone who dies, flies and is reincarnated, it's the story of someone who is stoned when he gets shot and who has an intonation of his own dream." Since the Cannes premiere, where the film was shown in competition but lost to Michael Haneke's great The White Ribbon/Das Weiße Band - Eine Deutsche Kindergeschichte (2009), the film continued to be refined and alter in following screenings. Noé himself says that the material that isn't in the short version of the film isn't essential; he had to make the shorter version due to a finance contract over length. In North America, the film opened #52 in 3 theaters to a 43k $ first weekend, later widening to 13 theaters and grossing 336k $ (24 % of the total gross). The 2nd and 3rd biggest markets were the UK with 137k $ (9.8 %) and France with 134k $ (9.6 %). One of the producers blamed the financial crisis for the film's poor performance. Enter the Void is fresh at 70 % with a 6.6 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of Enter the Void?