French dancers gather in a remote, empty school building to rehearse on a wintry night. The all-night celebration morphs into a hallucinatory nightmare when they learn their sangria is laced with LSD.
I approach films made by Gaspar Noé with a healthy amount of caution. Most prominent among his films are themes of violent tragedy, shocking brutality, and humanity’s most animalistic selves. He never shies away from graphic depictions of our most basic urges. His sex scenes are the stuff of legend for their in-your-face frankness and while he never lingers on violence too long he never hides the outcome from us. His new film, “Climax,” incorporates all these themes with his signature swirling camera techniques and throbbing editing styles. “Climax,” like many of his films before, takes us from a benign night out into a charnel house of horror, shame, and insanity fueled by LSD all while displaying his incredible proficiency in cinematic language.
1996. France. A group of edgy dancers celebrate the culmination of rushed performance by doing what they always do: dance. Meet the wide and varying cast as we learn the gossip (who’s sleeping with who, who’s jealous of who, who might be pregnant) and learn the camera techniques guiding our experience. A good three-fifths of the movie contains no substantial plotting but focuses purely on the dance and camerawork. Once everybody realizes they’ve drunk LSD-laced punch then the movie starts to fly. Grievances flare in glaring brightness inciting violence, rape, incest, murder, self-mutilation, and more. Suffice to say: this ain’t your average movie.
What would we be doing if we expected a simple plot? None of the promotional materials promised us a happy ending. Instead, the joy of the film comes in its execution. A near-impossible feat considering the number of single takes that comprise the entirety of the film.
While dancers slowly dive deeper and deeper into their psychosis, the camera literally swirls around the action. It never settles on a perfect level only giving us enough to latch on to that can string the narrative together. The ones incorporated throughout the film create a bold sense of bravado when effects happen. Hair catches fire, dancers break their bones, and women stab themselves in a single take begging the question: How did they do it?
“Climax” never lingers too long on any one piece. Each moment develops the thin narrative thread contained within each dancer introduced. One by one they all come to their breaking point as the LSD threatens their sanity. The pure shock value of the concepts introduced in the movie linger long after the closing credits. Much like Darren Aronofsky, Gaspar Noé isn’t concerned with appeasing his audience so much as driving a point home and challenging us to think.
While the film brings Dante’s vision of Hell to life, Noé cuts the film together using several key phrases. I’d be hard pressed to remember them since I can’t stop recalling the bloody madness that ensued. He shows us these images to remind us of our basest instincts. Beneath the intellectualism and mannerism we put on to impress each other we are, at heart, animals and will return to animal instincts or worse. By demonstrating the obliterating limits of human emotion we see what it’s like to react wildly to our worst fears. Self-mutilation, suicide, submission while others utilize the opportunity to demonstrate their dominance. It’s a grisly scene to watch but the sheer audacity of it makes the whole movie hard to look away.
Noé never disappoints in terms of novel formats. Before this film, he shot a 3D hard X-rated movie that displayed at Cannes to much applause and before that the seminal film student’s philosophy term paper “Enter the Void.” He never stops pushing for new boundaries and this film encompasses enough ghoulish humanity to fit firmly within the Gaspar Canon. But ignore the fancy words for one minute: You want to be shocked? You want to be scared? You want to be confused? Go see this movie. You appreciate the craft of films despite content you may otherwise disagree with? Go see this movie. Sofia Boutella is only one tiny element of the overall film. I doubt many will see this or others may find it distasteful. By now I’m acclimatized more appropriately to this director’s sensibilities, but I get it. He can be affronting. That’s part of the point. We need to confront our darker side if we’re to understand ourselves. At least we get to do it in style.
In theaters Friday, March 8th
