Letter to Gaspar


Dear Gaspar, can I call you Gaspar? You seem like you’d be cool with it.

I have never been compelled to write a review on IMDB until I saw your film Enter the Void.

Let me start with the one compliment I have for this film; I enjoyed the opening credits. The rest of the film disgusted me, and not because of the explicit sex and violence, as I like both Pink Flamingos and Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, but because of pretentious and repetitive use of shock factor that is mostly exploitive of the female characters.

The first problem of this film is that it fails to create any pathos between the characters and the audience. I don’t know who is more painful to listen to Oscar or his sister Linda. Oscar sounded like the missing third member of Beavis and Butthead, while Linda portrayed the voice of a talking American Apparel ad. All jokes aside, because neither of the characters made me feel any emotion, it didn’t matter to me that Oscar died or Linda was suffering through his death. Because Noé (don’t mind if I switch to third person) couldn’t create interesting characters or apparently direct the actors, he had to turn to an exploitive storyline, the death of their parents. He showed images of the crash, over and over again, in order to compensate for his lack of pathos. Of course I felt sorry for the traumatized children, but it didn’t make me identify with the present characters at all. Alex was the only character who was well directed in the film, but maybe he just has natural eurotrash talents.

The most disturbing part of this film was Noé’s attempt to film sex. Firstly, Linda-- aka white girl who goes to Tokyo and is offered a job as a stripper the first night of her trip—was obviously exploited. The sex scene between her and “Mario” (really—that’s his name?) was merely an excuse to show off her ‘edgy’ stripper uniform with matching heels. Throughout the film, Noé kept on showing her in minimal clothes with her breasts falling out in front of her brother to try and suggest incest, another failed exploitive repetition. Of course she becomes pregnant, and apathetically has an abortion. In the version that I saw, Noé explicitly shows the abortion and the fetus. Why Noé… are you trying to shock my virgin eyes? I would have been more shocked if you had actually portrayed any sort of emotion that one might feel when they suffer through this experience. All of the women in this film, running around in their stripper uniforms, were actually made un-sexy because Noé doesn’t know how to film women. He thinks that showing every part of their bodies is somehow interesting. I guess he hasn’t realized that suggested sexuality, unlike porn, can often be more exciting. I felt the most disgusted by his portrayal of the docile Japanese characters in the film. Linda’s stripper friend seemed to serve as exotic eye candy, there only to have exploitive lesbian sex with Linda…she had no depth! In fact all of the Japanese characters, men and women, barely spoke and only seemed to just ‘be there.’ Finally, I’m pretty sure Noé has attended a Freud 101 course while he received his Bac in France. The obvious obvious mother complex between Oscar and anyone with breasts was embarrassing. I have to admit that I felt like a 13 year old boy because I literally started laughing during the Love Hotel sequence. I felt sorry for Paz de la Huerta who had to repeatedly record her ‘orgasm voice’ so that Noé could use it as a voice over during this sequence. I truly didn’t understand this sequence… was I supposed to be turned on or disgusted…. Either way I was neither one nor the other… FAIL!

Regarding the computer graphics that were used in order to create the light effects, I felt that you went wayyyyy overboard. Gaspar… you should check out Millennium Mambo if you are interested in lighting technique.

To conclude, this film failed to incite any emotions at all…. One might say that Gaspar isn’t trying to evoke emotions like typical films, but rather trying to create over the top visuals, which practically poke fun at the audiences need for violence and sex (a la Funny Games) in a sadistic mise en abyme, watch me break the fourth wall manner. But then why create the story of childhood trauma? Maybe Gaspar can explain to me one day…


Yours truly,


Jennifer

reply

''Waaahh! Waaah!''.



I'm the grim reaper, Lardass, and you're my next customer.

reply

I sympathized with the characters, even if some of you were completely unable to. Maybe it has something to do with feeling like your whole life is hollow and baseless, like they did. I know what it feels like to just be lost and float around in the night from place to place and person to person. And it's a pretty apathetic existence, and I think Gaspar captured that pretty well.

I enjoyed the visuals and the camera shots, even the back of the head ones because I really felt like I was Oscar rewatching his life, but I have a good imagination so whatever.

Viewing their parents death three times didn't seem excessive to me, because it was a KEY turning point in both Oscar and Linda's lives, and so naturally upon his death, Oscar would float back to that point a few times to try and make sense of how it all led to this.

It's not a perfect film, but if it disgusts you, then you're not the kind of audience it's aiming for anyway. This is a movie for people who aren't afraid to push their mental and emotional boundaries and step outside their comfort zones when it comes to new experiences/films/whatever.

We're the A.P.B, and this thread is officially crashed.

reply

I think that the target audience isn't actually the people who will take the film lightly. If it was, then the film would immediately fail, because such people are already anticipating shock, and that makes it less pungent.

The film can only be truly effective on the "wrong kind" of people.

reply

Yeah Gaspar is up there with Uwe Boll IMO in terms of (bad directors). I can see he's trying hard, to be artistic and edgy and all, but for some reason, it's coming off wrong... so wrong that I can't even go as far as to say... "it was a nice try."

I mean, c'mon, the hand held camera techniques can be a stylistic thing, but for some reason in this film, it gave it a highschool project feel like instead.

That and the over usage of the over-the shoulder shots, top-view shots, and into-the-void-transitions; and by over usage, I mean, close to 3 hours worth of the same elements over and over.

reply

With Uwe Boll?

Really?
Even if you don't like Noe, you're gonna put right next to a director who gets his kick off of awful video game adaptions?


You mean Norman Bates Jr. is the baby daddy?

reply

Okay, so I gave the film another go; more like decided to finish it off since on my previous post, I stopped after 2/3rds of the film and couldn't go any further with the incessant strobbing visuals and thumping audio tones.

I decided to finish it off since I was so close to the end with about a good 30 to 40 minutes left and surprisingly, (and I'm not sure) but I think I enjoyed it.



Here's the kicker, the sense of enjoyment didn't arrive until WELL AFTER viewing the film. I think the problem why I didn't enjoy it initially was because I was viewing it as a film where I'm expecting (and looking for) it's main currency of entertainment from the story; but it's not. After viewing it, the enjoyment came from the experience.


It's like tripping out hard on a brand new substance no one still knows; and the self abusive part of me (self abusive as in I enjoy partying hard with liquor and etc.) is I think what kicked in my appreciation.


As in, when I finished the film and lay down in bed to call it a night... All I had in my mind was amazement and wonder of "what the heck just happened to me?" It's sort of euphoric like say... When you're drunk partying hard, you wish you hadn't drunk so much so you wouldn't feel so sick atm... but when looking back and all the feeling is gone.... all you could say was.... wow! what the heck was that; in a way, kind of awesome.

reply

Wow, I seriously never thought about it like that! But it makes a lot of sense actually. It's like that night that you tripped out too hard and can barely remember, but can't completely forget. You don't remember it for specifics, it's an incoherent mess of events and feelings.

We're the A.P.B, and this thread is officially crashed.

reply

After viewing it, the enjoyment came from the experience.

You hit the nail on the head right there. And a lot of directors who were inspired by Noe cite this same thing. It's about the experience, not the story. Noe's style is a roller coaster ride. His use of the camera is thrilling to me. And his films, even though they are depraved, repulsive, and--imo--physically taxing, they make me feel things that no other films can. And I can't say I didn't enjoy the experience of watching his films immensely despite being so repulsed at the same time. :P

___________________
"Well... sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand." -Cool Hand Luke

reply

Great post/letter. I felt the same exact way after watching this. I care not at all for the characters and they were just devices to shock rather than to incite emotion.

The movie is full of fail and the only people who think it is great are the people who found something that they have placed into the movie, and it's depth.

reply

Thank you, it had to be said.

reply

The most pretentious, self-righteous post I've seen on IMdB in a long time. So you didn't like the movie. Big deal. Not liking a movie doesn't make you somehow unique or especially talented, nor your opinion particularly valuable. A lot of people did like the film (including me, although I see its flaws). It's a radical departure from most movie-making norms. Noe deserves credit at the very least for trying something radical.

"I've seen things that would make you want to write a book on how to puke."

reply

I agree with the majority of this. There were too many shock moments that were just cold and not in a sense that they invoked a cold feeling of depression & sorrow in me, cold as in they just didn't hit at all and were completely off point and wasted moments.

Like the implied incest, it just didn't seem likely that a psychological issue like that would form between the two sibling's split by that many years without anyone to take notice of some type of impairment during their development, well, Linda's, really.

And the abortion was just too close together with the reincarnation, that and the fact that the abortion is completely undermined, that had to be the biggest miss in the entire film and comes off as the clearest example of shock value. The scenes before that that lead up to the abortion works when you view it as setting up some type of foundation & significance for Oscar's reincarnation but to just simply leave the embryo as is, without showing Linda at least acknowledging it in some emotionally distraught way just left me disappointed in that regard.

Also, maybe if Noe had delved into their time in foster care more, I would have not only understood more but felt more compassionate about them as adults. They were just too dull at times and Linda's obvious mental issues seemed too detrimental to their development to just skip past.

"...Because we can't masturbate in theaters."

reply

regarding the specific criticisms of the topic starter, those 'weak spots' may actually not be the deficiencies of the filmmaker's abilities but a concious choice and conveying certain messages about the characters and their world.

my vote history:
http://imdb.com/mymovies/list?l=27424531

reply