The provocateur of French cinema, Argentinian-born filmmaker Gaspar Noé (Irreversible, Enter the Void, Love), isn’t afraid to upset his viewers with depictions of graphic sex, violence or LSD-spiked dance parties. So it comes as a bit of a shock to see that his latest, the suggestively titled Vortex, is a solemn, documentary-like depiction of an elderly couple muddling through the last stretch of their time on this planet. The days of a left-wing Franco-Italian couple in Paris are now mostly empty and hopeless to such an extent that a simply humdrum moment might turn into the day’s highlight as it offers a quick reminder of the “glory” of days gone by. This Noé joint is, in other words, violent and tragic in much less obvious and more insidious ways.
Shot in split-screen for nearly the entire duration of the film, Vortex also has a rigorous formalist verve despite being otherwise very naturalistic in its approach to the quotidian details of life and death. It premiered in Cannes as an Out of Competition title and should interest festivals as well as boutique distributors, who might also be enticed by a rare acting turn from Italian giallo maestro Dario Argento, who shares the screen here with French acting royalty Françoise Lebrun (from Jean Eustache’s 1973 masterpiece The Mother and the Whore, perhaps one of the most formative French films for a lot of younger filmmakers).
Vortex
The Bottom Line Shocking in subtle ways.
Vortex opens with a telling dedication: “To all those whose brain will decompose before their hearts,” which is a reference to Lebrun’s unnamed character (credited as “the mother” in the press notes, natch), a former shrink who suffers from Alzheimer’s. She has occasional moments of lucidity but increasingly she doesn’t recognize even those closest to her. At one point, she asks her adult son (French comedian Alex Lutz in a convincing dramatic turn) about the man who is always following her around. That man would be her husband of countless years (Argento, “the father”), a film critic working on a book about dreams and cinema.
The film’s ominous opening shows both of them in bed in their cluttered Paris apartment. A clock radio goes off and jumps right into the middle of a show about the mourning process (an on-the-nose starting point, perhaps, though few would ever accuse Noé’s cinema of being particularly subtle). Instead of a widescreen image of the couple in bed, however, we see two boxy images with rounded corners next to each another. The left-hand box shows Argento’s character, who continues to sleep in, while the right-hand one follows Lebrun as she gets up and goes into the kitchen to make coffee.
Even in this first scene, the startling sensation provided by seeing two realities at once, in two practically adjacent rooms in the same small apartment, creates a physical gap and a sense of distance between the two characters that will be almost impossible to close again. It’s a clever cinematic trick that underlines to what extent the two characters have grown apart. Perhaps this is due at least a little to life and because they’ve been together for so long — we later discover that Argento’s character also has a mistress… — but especially because her disease makes it increasingly problematic for them to remain together in any sort of independent way.
Argento’s character can’t leave her alone for five minutes to work on his book because she might wander onto the street and forget who she is and where she lives. Noé captures all these things in what feels like real time, with its lulls and empty stretches as well as small crises and increasingly rare moments of joy. This documentary-like approach takes the viewer right into the reality of coming to terms with old age and not being able to live life like you’ve done for decades — but also with the shocking reality of what it means to see the future in front of you shrinking so quickly and confusingly that it feels like you could rear-end death itself at any given moment.
There’s an extraordinary scene in the film’s second half, in which Lebrun has a moment of lucidity and her husband and son talk about how they should organize their small family’s future. It’s heartbreaking to watch all three struggle to face the dire reality that things simply can’t continue like this and that there’s no way they’ll return to how they were before. Argento’s character is stubborn and refuses to leave their apartment, even though an assisted living facility would be better suited to their situation, and Lebrun’s character whispers, without vanity or a hint of self-pity, that maybe it would be easier if she died, or if they got rid of her. To underline this unusual moment of near-togetherness as a family, the two camera axes are very closely but not quite aligned, with Lebrun at one point leaning backwards into the couch and suddenly appearing with her head in both images like a Janus figure, suggesting the impossible duality of the choice in front of them.
The hushed closing reels are unusual in Noé’s oeuvre in that they generate straightforward empathy and emotion without falling back on gimmicks, trickery or shock tactics. It feels like a more mature Noé has arrived, one who stays calmer and is less manipulative than Haneke was in Amour but with a similarly impactful ending. The handful of traces of the more emphatically on-the-nose filmmaker almost help to underline how reined in everything else really is.
Lebrun is quietly extraordinary in a role that’s stripped bare to its most essential elements, while Argento, too, is affecting, even though it’s not quite credible that his French wouldn’t be a little bit better if he has (supposedly) lived for decades in Paris as a film critic. Since a lot of the dialogue was improvised, there’s a searching quality to his words, however, that really help suggest how lost his own character is, even if he’s doesn’t have any problems with his memory.
Cinematographer Benoit Debie’s precision split-screen work will attract the most attention, but equal praise should go to Jean Rabasse’s production design. The couple’s rundown apartment, stuffed to the rafters with the material flotsam but also often emotionally significant treasures of two fully lived lives, offers a backdrop that’s more suggestive than any specific backstory could ever be. Until the home will inevitably be emptied and passed on to a new set of inhabitants with their own stories to tell and tchotchkes to cherish.
"film" - Google News
July 17, 2021 at 06:22AM
https://ift.tt/3yYhGRA
‘Vortex’: Film Review | Cannes 2021 - Hollywood Reporter
"film" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2qM7hdT
https://ift.tt/3fb7bBl
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "‘Vortex’: Film Review | Cannes 2021 - Hollywood Reporter"
Post a Comment