Letter to Gaspar
Dear Gaspar, can I call you Gaspar? You seem like you’d be cool with it.
I have never been compelled to write a review on IMDB until I saw your film Enter the Void.
Let me start with the one compliment I have for this film; I enjoyed the opening credits. The rest of the film disgusted me, and not because of the explicit sex and violence, as I like both Pink Flamingos and Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, but because of pretentious and repetitive use of shock factor that is mostly exploitive of the female characters.
The first problem of this film is that it fails to create any pathos between the characters and the audience. I don’t know who is more painful to listen to Oscar or his sister Linda. Oscar sounded like the missing third member of Beavis and Butthead, while Linda portrayed the voice of a talking American Apparel ad. All jokes aside, because neither of the characters made me feel any emotion, it didn’t matter to me that Oscar died or Linda was suffering through his death. Because Noé (don’t mind if I switch to third person) couldn’t create interesting characters or apparently direct the actors, he had to turn to an exploitive storyline, the death of their parents. He showed images of the crash, over and over again, in order to compensate for his lack of pathos. Of course I felt sorry for the traumatized children, but it didn’t make me identify with the present characters at all. Alex was the only character who was well directed in the film, but maybe he just has natural eurotrash talents.
The most disturbing part of this film was Noé’s attempt to film sex. Firstly, Linda-- aka white girl who goes to Tokyo and is offered a job as a stripper the first night of her trip—was obviously exploited. The sex scene between her and “Mario” (really—that’s his name?) was merely an excuse to show off her ‘edgy’ stripper uniform with matching heels. Throughout the film, Noé kept on showing her in minimal clothes with her breasts falling out in front of her brother to try and suggest incest, another failed exploitive repetition. Of course she becomes pregnant, and apathetically has an abortion. In the version that I saw, Noé explicitly shows the abortion and the fetus. Why Noé… are you trying to shock my virgin eyes? I would have been more shocked if you had actually portrayed any sort of emotion that one might feel when they suffer through this experience. All of the women in this film, running around in their stripper uniforms, were actually made un-sexy because Noé doesn’t know how to film women. He thinks that showing every part of their bodies is somehow interesting. I guess he hasn’t realized that suggested sexuality, unlike porn, can often be more exciting. I felt the most disgusted by his portrayal of the docile Japanese characters in the film. Linda’s stripper friend seemed to serve as exotic eye candy, there only to have exploitive lesbian sex with Linda…she had no depth! In fact all of the Japanese characters, men and women, barely spoke and only seemed to just ‘be there.’ Finally, I’m pretty sure Noé has attended a Freud 101 course while he received his Bac in France. The obvious obvious mother complex between Oscar and anyone with breasts was embarrassing. I have to admit that I felt like a 13 year old boy because I literally started laughing during the Love Hotel sequence. I felt sorry for Paz de la Huerta who had to repeatedly record her ‘orgasm voice’ so that Noé could use it as a voice over during this sequence. I truly didn’t understand this sequence… was I supposed to be turned on or disgusted…. Either way I was neither one nor the other… FAIL!
Regarding the computer graphics that were used in order to create the light effects, I felt that you went wayyyyy overboard. Gaspar… you should check out Millennium Mambo if you are interested in lighting technique.
To conclude, this film failed to incite any emotions at all…. One might say that Gaspar isn’t trying to evoke emotions like typical films, but rather trying to create over the top visuals, which practically poke fun at the audiences need for violence and sex (a la Funny Games) in a sadistic mise en abyme, watch me break the fourth wall manner. But then why create the story of childhood trauma? Maybe Gaspar can explain to me one day…
Yours truly,
Jennifer