Tag: Irreversible

The best films of a decade

This column has been the elephant in my living room for months.

Putting together a list of the year’s best films is easy. It’s fresh. It’s in your mind. It’s, in many ways, the expected culmination.

Putting together a list of the decade’s best films is a different chore altogether. Yearly rankings fly out the window as a proper gauge, because tastes shift and impacts either dwindle or deepen. Revisiting films is called for, but fitting in the works you missed along the way is also imperative. It can be maddening.

And the truth is, you can’t see everything. All you can do is try to be as honest about how you feel as you can. And even then, no list can be definitive on a personal level, let alone authoritative.

And so the whittling begins, and in many ways, the process is the reward. The ultimate collective is a mere reminder of the journey through 10 years of film product. But some things stuck out along the way.

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December 21, 2009
LONDON: ‘Enter the Void,’ ‘Wolfy’

As if sympathetic to the fact that I’d have a pounding hangover from Wednesday’s swish opening party in Chelsea, festival organizers were kind enough to schedule a film I’d already seen, “The Men Who Stare at Goats,” for the next morning, affording me a much-needed lie-in.

Still, George Clooney’s second go-round on the LFF red carpet in as many days was the day’s major event. I already weighed in on the film at Venice, though from conversations I’ve had with others, I’m not finding many supporters for my view that the film is big, silly fun.

Anyway, missing this stop on the Clooney-London express afforded me the chance to catch up with two artier prospects that had been high on my festival priority list, one big (Gaspar Noé’s latest Cannes-endorsed provocation “Enter the Void”) and one small (Russian playwright Vassily Sigarev’s filmmaking debut “Wolfy”). Guess which one was the keeper.

“Enter the Void” (**)

Back in 2002, more column inches were spent on two isolated scenes — an agonizing rape sequence and that fire-extinguisher bludgeoning — than the whole of Gaspar Noé’s “Irréversible,” but amid the shrill cries of the moral police, the film arguably received insufficient credit for its thoughtfulness (and structural verve) in probing and evaluating the way we respond to onscreen violence. An astonishing technical feat by any measure, it was that rare film that revealed something of the viewer to himself, albeit in an unpleasant fashion.

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October 16, 2009
Final Cannes contenders unveiled

That’s it — all 20 Palme d’Or contenders have now screened for critics, and the final deliberations can begin. Most of the media attention in the past two days has focused on Gaspar Noé’s new film “Enter the Void,” though it hasn’t aroused anything like the firestorm of controversy that his “Irréversible” did in 2002. (Perhaps the media simply hasn’t the energy for a fight after “Antichrist.”)

Although reportedly as violent and sexually explicit as one would expect from Noé, the film, which screened at the Croisette in still-unfinished form, seems to have prompted more confusion than outrage from the press. The critical response, meanwhile, is more positive than might have been expected. Manohla Dargis leads the cheer team for the film:

An exceptional work, though less because of its story, acting or any of the usual critical markers. What largely distinguishes it, beyond the stunning cinematography, is that this is the work of an artist who’s trying to show us something we haven’t seen before, even while he liberally samples images and ideas from Stanley Kubrick and the entirety of American avant-garde cinema. The grungy milieu and calculated shocks might have been designed to make you flee – even while your attention is tethered to the camera – but, really, these aren’t the point. The point is the filmmaking.

ScreenDaily’s Mike Goodridge is somewhat awed, describing the film as “a wild, hallucinatory mindfuck” that is “nothing short of hypnotic,” even suggesting the film as a future staple for narcotic-fuelled viewings — though like Dargis, he dismisses the characterisation and narrative as being of secondary quality and importance. Variety is less forgiving, labelling the film “tiresomely gimmicky” and implying it is less “pure cinema” than “pure trash.”

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May 23, 2009
Troublemakers united

Yours truly began a two-part Cannes preview this morning, but there is plenty more such coverage around if you’re beginning to get festival fever. I particularly liked Jonathan Romney’s rundown in the Independent, in which the critic points out an interesting trend in this year’s lineup: namely the convergence of several renowned enfants terribles in one year.

There’s almost always one title in contention whose extremities — whether of sex, violence or other — set tongues wagging along the Croisette, but this year looks to be particularly hard on the faint-hearted. Quentin Tarantino’s bound-to-be-grisly “Inglourious Basterds” looks positively milquetoast compared some of the other fare on offer, including “Oldboy” director Park Chan-Wook’s decidedly adult vampire tale “Thirst” and Lars Von Trier’s seemingly unnerving foray into horror territory, “Antichrist.”

Michael Haneke’s new effort doesn’t look like a box of kittens either, but as Romney writes, none of these filmmakers instil quite as much fear in mild-mannered filmgoers as Frenchman Gaspar Noé:

These days, the shocks come a little stiffer. A hardened colleague of mine walked out of Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible (2002) after the opening salvo of 13 blows to the head with a fire extinguisher – thereby missing considerably worse to follow … With Enter the Void, it’s more than likely that he’ll attempt to up the ante on Irréversible. Touted as “a hallucinatory maelstrom”, it involves a stripper’s brother who reviews the violent circumstances of his death, from the afterlife. Laden with special effects and screeching neon colours, Noé has promised it will be more psychedelic than violent – but at two-and-a-half hours, it certainly won’t be an easy ride.

I’m interested to see whether Noé can build more critical cache this year beyond the controversy that greeted his previous work — for all its look-at-me theatrics, “Irréversible” is a much better film than it’s usually given credit for. With several other title jostling for the attention of the more excitable media outlets this year, perhaps there’s more of a chance people will find the film beneath the fuss.

And as Romney points out, if anyone can handle it, it’s a jury that includes such notably fearless figures as Isabelle Huppert and Asia Argento. Bring it on.

May 11, 2009