At Cannes: Enter the Void

Of all the filmmakers showing in competition here at Cannes, few were more eagerly anticipated by cinema-goers and critics alike than French auteur Gaspar Noé. Perhaps that's due to the fact that it's been seven years since he last made a feature film -- the excellent Irreversible, which debuted at Cannes in competition. Or perhaps it's due to the fact that Noé only finished Enter the Void days ago. He was so late in completing it, in fact, that the screening had to be rescheduled to accommodate his tardiness — no time even for a black-tie screening.

The film tells a simple story in a needlessly convoluted fashion. Set in present day Tokyo — though it could have been any city in the world, as we don't hear a lick of Japanese — we meet Oscar (first-time actor Nathaniel Brown), a small-time American drug dealer. He convinces his comely sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta, a Juliette Lewis look- and sound-alike) to move to Tokyo as well, where the beauty finds work as a stripper. One evening, as Oscar is delivering drugs to his pal in the bar The Void, he's caught up in a drug bust gone horribly wrong (at least by Japanese law enforcement standards): Oscar, unarmed, is shot and killed while ditching his stash in the toilet.

Noé shows none of the excellent flourishes he used in Irreversible: the clever and effective use of flashbacks and reverse chronological storytelling used to weave the gripping story of a Paris woman savagely raped. Instead, we get a laughable and pointless mélange of flashbacks leading up to the shooting (which yields the following information: Oscar was a drug dealer), and scene upon scene of spectacularly colorful drug-induced hallucinations.

Speaking of laughable, a few notes about the acting, if you can call it that. It's so atrocious, that it's a wonder if it was intentional, though I think that's giving Noé far too much credit. Paz de la Huerta, who's currently being seen by audiences as the naked girl in the disappointing Jim Jarmusch film The Limits of Control, is wildly attractive, but delivers her lines in a sing-songy monotone that at least once during the press screening caused the audience to laugh inappropriately. It's more difficult to criticize Brown, an actor with no experience whose face is never shown. Noé chose to film all the scenes in which Brown's character is alive by either placing the camera directly behind him, or with sweeping overhead shots.

In the festival schedule, the running time was listed at two hours thirty minutes. At just about that time, the screen went dark, and the audience in the packed Lumiere theater — filled with journalists, guests and Noé himself — began to howl and get up from their seats. All of a sudden, something more appeared on screen. Piercing yellow lights, then the final scene surfaced, like a hidden CD track. Exiting crowds stopped and watched from the aisles. The final running time is two hours forty minutes, a length that will surely be sliced should this film ever see the light of day in the States.

To be fair, Noé rushed to get this print to Cannes — there weren't even open or closing credits or a title sequence. But even at two hours let's say, it's still unwatchable. RATING (out of 10): 1.5