CLIMAX **1/2
Gaspar Noé
2018
IDEA: A troupe of dancers descend into animalistic chaos after they drink sangria that was secretly spiked with LSD.
BLURB: Gaspar Noé’s fascination with bodies under the influence – mostly of psychotropic drugs, but also of primal urges and various visceral states of ecstasy and suffering – reaches its zenith in Climax. It is a film of writhing, ululating corporeal intensity, a Theatre of Cruelty-invocation of somatic experience at its vertiginous limits. As always, Noé locates in these limit-experiences a constantly oscillating exhilaration and terror, where the surrender of the self to sensations that rupture and overwhelm it becomes an act of extreme liberation – jouissance – that also always threatens the complete disintegration of the ego. And just as characteristically, he emphasizes the fetid, the abject, offering a grotesque view of human bodily capacity that underlines his thesis on the horror of existence. This nihilistic attitude is compounded, even more odiously, by Climax’s politics. If the film is concerned with the volatility and violability of the carnal body, it is also, by extension, concerned with the instability of a contemporary, multicultural body-politic. The fissures that emerge from the interactions of its ethnically and sexually diverse dancers are figured as inevitable effects of social heterogeneity; their collapse into anarchy can easily be interpreted as a xenophobic wariness of a globalized Europe, a reading reinforced by Noé’s assigning to the black characters the film’s most violent behavior. But is this inveterate provocateur merely agitating us, or sending an insidious message? Either way, Climax’s virtuosic formal inventions can’t help but feel at odds with ideas that come across as so reactionary.
BLURB: Gaspar Noé’s fascination with bodies under the influence – mostly of psychotropic drugs, but also of primal urges and various visceral states of ecstasy and suffering – reaches its zenith in Climax. It is a film of writhing, ululating corporeal intensity, a Theatre of Cruelty-invocation of somatic experience at its vertiginous limits. As always, Noé locates in these limit-experiences a constantly oscillating exhilaration and terror, where the surrender of the self to sensations that rupture and overwhelm it becomes an act of extreme liberation – jouissance – that also always threatens the complete disintegration of the ego. And just as characteristically, he emphasizes the fetid, the abject, offering a grotesque view of human bodily capacity that underlines his thesis on the horror of existence. This nihilistic attitude is compounded, even more odiously, by Climax’s politics. If the film is concerned with the volatility and violability of the carnal body, it is also, by extension, concerned with the instability of a contemporary, multicultural body-politic. The fissures that emerge from the interactions of its ethnically and sexually diverse dancers are figured as inevitable effects of social heterogeneity; their collapse into anarchy can easily be interpreted as a xenophobic wariness of a globalized Europe, a reading reinforced by Noé’s assigning to the black characters the film’s most violent behavior. But is this inveterate provocateur merely agitating us, or sending an insidious message? Either way, Climax’s virtuosic formal inventions can’t help but feel at odds with ideas that come across as so reactionary.
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