21/05 - CANNES DAILY ON ENTER THE VOID

ENTERTAINMENT / CANNES FILM FESTIVAL / CANNES DAILY / 21/05 - CANNES DAILY ON ENTER THE VOID

21 May 2009 — When Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock premiered last week, the Cannes Film Festival was awash in hippie nostalgia. A few festival veterans sat around recalling a day back in the spring of 1969 (three months before the Woodstock music festival happened in New York) when Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson were starring in Easy Rider and strolling together along the Croisette. What ever happened to the days of peace, love and understanding? Where have all the flowers gone?We don't know about the flowers, but we do know what happens to people who take too many drugs. They end up like the characters in Gaspar Noé's Enter the Void. No, we don't mean to imply that all people who take hallucinogenic drugs end up being shot in Tokyo and then float around the city awaiting reincarnation. That's pretty much what happens to Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) in Enter the Void. Or at least that's what we think happens to him. We get a look at Oscar's face only once or twice in the whole movie, reflected in a mirror. The first half-hour is filmed as if we're looking through Oscar's dilated pupils and as if we're smoking his pipeful of DMT for him. Then Noé's camera twists, turns and spins to follow Oscar's disembodied spirit around and especially above Tokyo. The latter part of Enter the Void focuses on the back of Oscar's head, and both storyline and the film itself get blurrier by the minute. Oscar's sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta) is a stripper, which allows her to spend most of the movie unclothed. Linda's pimp boyfriend and Oscar's drug-buddies come and go but they don't leave much of an impression.Don't mistake Enter the Void for a film about drugs — it's a film that wants to compte with drugs. Watching Enter the Void may be as close as you can get to hallucinating without actually having to watch your own fingers turn into salamanders. Whatever else it is, this third feature from Gaspar Noé is a trip. And what a long (163 minutes in its current incarnation) strange trip it is.Enter the Void would have been right at home in Cannes in 1969. The Tibetan Book of the Dead features prominently, as does DMT, GHB, datura and LSD. Still, this is 2009, and some people attending the film's premiere today in the Lumière cinema were audibly displeased. The jeers and walk-outs didn't seem to phase Noé, although he was proabably feeling too flat-out exhausted to be phased. He has been working for the better part of a sleepless month getting Enter the Void in shape for the Cannes festival (where it happens to be in competition against, among other films, Taking Woodstock). Noé had spent 10 years writing the script (yes, Enter the Void has a script) and he worked equally hard getting all the visual effects and camera movements to come out right. At the press conference following the afternoon screening, Noé told us he was surprised he hadn't heard more complaints. "I was expecting people to boo and hiss," he said. "I like that." — Randall KoralThis year NESPRESSO has Cannes covered, inside and out. Vincent Maraval gives us his take on the films his company, Wild Bunch, is screening during the festival ("Un Autre Regard", exclusively on NESPRESSO's website, daily at 6 p.m.). And Randall Koral, NESPRESSO's Cannes correspondent, serves up his impressions of the films and festivities as they happen ("Cannes Daily", 11 a.m. CET).