The term enfant terrible could have been invented for Gaspar Noé. Just when it seemed that the main character in his debut feature, Seul Contre Tous (I Stand Alone), could not be any more violent and sadistic, a blood-red, epilepsy-inducing warning advised viewers: "You have 30 seconds to leave the cinema." His sophomore effort, Irreversible, contained the most talked-about scene of 2002: a brutal, nine-minute attack on a party girl (played by Monica Bellucci) in a Parisian underground walkway. It was shot with an unflinching, stationary camera.
It's safe to say Noé's films push the boundaries. A desire to shock is apparent in many of them, and his hyper-real depiction of violence has made him the Sam Peckinpah of modern cinema. Yet it would be wrong to think of him only as a creator of shock cinema. His films combine technical brilliance with pulsating and intense action, and it's probably why the selectors at Cannes were so eager to show Noé's new film, Enter the Void, in May, even though it wasn't finished.
Now, Noé is about to premiere the final, slightly shorter cut for American audiences at the Sundance Film Festival. He'll also give a talk about his filmmaking in what will surely be one of the must-see events in Park City. Enter the Void opens on a Tokyo balcony. The character Linda (Paz de la Huerta) seems to be talking directly into the camera, but it slowly becomes apparent that she is conversing with her brother, Oscar (Nathaniel Brown). The film is shot from Oscar's perspective, and the audience only gets to see what he looks like when he looks into the mirror.
Oscar guides viewers through Tokyo's underbelly - that is, until he is unexpectedly shot dead in the toilet of a nightclub called The Void. The camera drifts behind Oscar's shoulder, and he can suddenly see everything that has happened in his life. In many stories - from A Christmas Carol to It's a Wonderful Life - out-of-body experiences result in characters making big discoveries or life-changing decisions, but Noé turns this concept on its head. Oscar learns nothing.
It is left open whether the Void of the title refers to the nightclub, Oscar's life or his experiences after being shot. After the film screened at Cannes, Noé seemed disappointed by the response. "I was shocked by the fact that no one was booing or whistling during the movie and I kept thinking something had gone wrong," he said. "I'm so used to people screaming at the premiere of every movie I make that when it didn't happen I thought: 'That's weird.' But then I read the reviews and some people really hated the film, and I thought: 'Oh, it's actually OK.'"
Despite the evidence to the contrary, Noé says he does not go out of his way to offend. "Whatever you do in life, you have enemies," he says. "People can hate you because you have brown or red hair. You cannot even hide in the shadows and stop speaking to people in the hope of ensuring that you don't have enemies, as some will just hate you for doing that. It's not because everyone is against you, it's because everyone is fighting for themselves. So the more you show off or talk in an open way, there will be others who have the total opposite vision of life."
Born in Argentina, Noé, the son of the painter Luis Felipe Noé, graduated from the Louis Lumiere National College in France, where he still resides. He arrived on the scene just as a group of France-based filmmakers began making aggressive movies that aimed to smash the popular cinema image of French cafe society. Noé and his contemporaries - Claire Denis, Catherine Breillat, Jan Kounen and Michael Haneke - made films with shock value.
After a stream of explicit mainstream films such as In the Realm of the Senses and Last Tango in Paris in the 1970s, it no longer seemed possible to offend with just images. But these directors tapped into the fact that coupling a difficult image with a taboo could still offend audiences' sensibilities. All of a sudden, it was cool for filmmakers to shock, and Noé had found his calling. After his 30-second warning in Seul Contre Tous (lifted from William Castle's 1961 Homicidal), there is a false ending in which the butcher kills his daughter.
Irreversible begins with the butcher in jail, but this isn't the start of a moral rebalance; it's just another grand joke about romance. The film follows the formal conventions of a romantic comedy: two people are brought together by an outside event, they are attracted to each other and they end up happy in each other's arms. However, the story is told backwards, and the rosy Hollywood picture is replaced with a cynical dismissal of the possibility of romantic love.
Enter the Void, however, finds Noé in more restrained form. The director says that he has reappraised his life and, as a result, altered his approach to making movies as well as life in general. "I used to be very crazy," Noé says. "Then I reconsidered my own patterns. It takes so much energy to make a movie that you have to be totally in your mind. I wouldn't say that I had an intense adolescence, but I like roller coasters. But I've been very clean lately."
On his choice of Toyko as a location for Into the Void, Noé says: "It's like a huge pinball machine, and I thought in the end it's both a scary and extraterrestrial place to drop these two cats into. Also, if you want to find a city that looks like the movie Tron, you have to go to either Las Vegas or Tokyo and I don't like Las Vegas. "So I thought it's much better to go to a real city where people are obsessed by physical interaction."
Noé has learnt the hard way that a life of excess comes with problems, and his latest film contains a strong anti-drug theme. It suggests that the 47-year-old filmmaker has finally grown up. One of the most striking attributes of Noé's films is the technical wizardry that he exhibits in the camera work. It was something that Stanley Kubrick also imbued in his films, so it's hardly surprising when Noé cites Kubrick and the British experimentalist filmmaker Kenneth Anger as the main influences on Enter the Void. (The wild characters that populate Noé's Tokyo are straight out of Anger's work.)
Noé goes so far as to redo the ending of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey in Enter the Void, except that his version is far more obvious and, in its length, tedious. It seems that Noé can't help but try to unsettle the audience in some way. He feels that he must be doing something right, though, because he calls it "the most talked-about moment of the film". And yet, it's only the director who seems to want to talk about it. It's a cheap trick and the one moment that misfires in his innovative new work. One day, Noé will learn that offending for the sake of offending is not what makes him such an interesting and challenging director.