Enter the Void
Enter the Void is a 2009 surrealist art film written and directed by Gaspar Noé, from a screenplay co-written with his wife Lucile Hadzihalilovic. Set in the neon-lit nightclub environments of Tokyo, the story follows Oscar, a young American drug dealer who gets fatally shot by the police, but continues to watch subsequent events during an out-of-body experience. The film is shot from a first-person viewpoint with extensive uses of long take, which often floats above the city streets, and occasionally features Oscar staring over his own shoulder as he recalls moments from his past. Noé labels the film a "psychedelic melodrama".
A passion project for Noé since his adolescence, the film was in development hell for years until its production was made possible after the commercial success of his earlier feature, Irréversible. Enter the Void was primarily financed by Wild Bunch, while Fidélité Films led the actual production. With a mix of professionals and newcomers, the film makes heavy use of imagery inspired by experimental cinema and psychedelic drug experiences. Principal photography took place on location in Tokyo, and involved many complicated crane shots. Co-producers included the visual effects studio BUF Compagnie, which also provided the computer-generated imagery. The film's soundtrack is a collage of electronic pop and experimental music.
A rough cut premiered at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, but post-production work continued, and the film was not released in France until almost a year later. A cut-down version was released in the United States and United Kingdom in September 2010. The critical response was sharply divided: positive reviews described the film as captivating and innovative, while negative reviews called it tedious and puerile. The film performed poorly at the box office.
Plot
American siblings Oscar and Linda live in an apartment in Tokyo, and have vowed to stay together following the accidental death of their parents. Oscar deals drugs while Linda works as a stripper in a Tokyo strip club. Most of the film takes place in Oscar's first-person perspective, with flashbacks to his and Linda's past taking place from an outside perspective.One evening, after Linda has left for work, Oscar smokes DMT and indulges in a hallucinogenic trip until his friend Victor summons him to a drug deal at a bar known as "The Void". Oscar's other friend Alex spontaneously visits and accompanies him to the bar. On the way, Alex discusses The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a Buddhist scripture on reincarnation, and anticipates the events to come by describing the process of death. Oscar enters "The Void" alone, and finds that he has walked into a sting; the police raid the bar when Oscar greets a distressed Victor. Oscar escapes into a bathroom stall and vainly attempts to flush the drugs into the squat toilet. As the officers try to kick in the door, Oscar bluffs that he is armed, resulting in the police shooting him in the chest through the door. Oscar's soul – as well as the first-person perspective – rises from his body, and he goes in search of Linda, attempting to fulfill his promise to never leave her. For the remainder of the movie, Oscar's soul travels through Tokyo, watching over his friends and sister, as well as flashing back to memories of his childhood and his earlier life in Tokyo that led him to become a drug dealer.
The lives of Oscar and Linda are presented in short non-chronological flashbacks; in the midst of a happy childhood, their parents were killed in a violent car crash. Before being sent to different foster homes, the siblings took an oath to always be there for each other. Years later, Oscar lived as a small-time drug dealer in Tokyo and was soon able to afford a plane ticket for Linda to live with him. Linda found work as a stripper for nightclub owner Mario. As Oscar's business expanded, Victor discovered that Oscar had sex with his mother to secure extra funding for Linda's plane ticket. This led him to set up the raid that ended Oscar's life.
Linda becomes pregnant, loses her job as a stripper, and has an abortion. Alex is forced into hiding on the streets after Oscar's dealer, Bruno, breaks up the drug ring.
Linda wishes she had gotten involved with Alex instead of Mario as Oscar wanted. On one occasion, Linda wishes that Oscar would come back to life; Oscar then enters Linda's head and experiences her dream in which he wakes up at the morgue, from which his body is taken to be cremated. Greatly distressed by the presence of her deceased brother's cremated remains in her home, and constantly plagued by nightmares about the loss of him, she dumps the ashes down the drain of her kitchen sink. Meanwhile, Victor argues with his mother over her involvement with Oscar, and he is thrown out of the house. He then visits Linda to apologize for his role in Oscar's death. However, when he also accuses Linda of complicity in her brother's death, she angrily chases Victor away, demanding that he kill himself.
Oscar hovers over Tokyo and lands on a plane, in which Oscar's mother breast-feeds a baby Oscar. Linda and Alex take a taxi to a Tokyo love hotel and have sex. Oscar moves among hotel rooms and observes several other couples having sex in various positions. He also spots Victor giving fellatio to a man in one of the rooms, with another man watching and taking his belt off. Each couple emanates flashes of light from their genitals. Oscar enters Alex's head and witnesses the sex with Linda from Alex's perspective. He then travels inside Linda's vagina to witness Alex's penis thrusting into it, then observes his ejaculation and follows the channel of sperm into the fertilization of his sister's ovum. The final scene is shot from the perspective of a baby being born, with the camera focus strongly blurred, making it unclear who the woman in the scene is.
Cast
Themes
The cinematic experience itself is the main focus of the film, but there is also a central theme of emptiness. Noé describes the film's subject as "the sentimentality of mammals and the shimmering vacuity of the human experience." The dramaturgy after Oscar has been shot is loosely based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and ends with the spirit's search for a way to reincarnate. The director, who opposes all religious beliefs, says that "the whole movie is a dream of someone who read The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and heard about it before being . It's not the story of someone who dies, flies and is reincarnated, it's the story of someone who is stoned when he gets shot and who has an intonation of his own dream." Noé describes the ending of the film as Oscar's recollection of "the most traumatic moment of his life – his own birth". The director also leaves open the possibility that Oscar's life starts over again in an endless loop, due to the human brain's perception of time.Production
Development
The idea for the film had been growing since Noé's adolescence, when he first became interested in matters of death and existence. In his early twenties—while under influence of psilocybin mushrooms—he saw Robert Montgomery's Lady in the Lake, a 1947 film shot entirely in a first-person perspective. He then decided that, if he ever made a film about the afterlife, that was the way in which it would be filmed. Noé had been working on different versions of the screenplay for fifteen years before the film went into production. The story had initially been more linear, and the drafts were set in different locations, including the Andes, France, and New York City. Tokyo was chosen because it could provide colourful environments required for the film's hallucinogenic aspects, and because Japan's repressive drug laws add to the drama, explaining the intensity of the main character's fear of the police.Noé first tried to get the film funded in the early 2000s. Several producers responded positively to the script, and it was briefly under development for Tom Tykwer's German company X-Filme Creative Pool. It was considered too expensive and the producers dropped out. Prospects changed when Irréversible became a commercial success. Noé had written and directed Irréversible for StudioCanal, and it was sold internationally by their subsidiary, Wild Bunch. When the producers at Wild Bunch asked Noé what he wanted to do next, he answered Enter the Void. The project was once again considered too expensive in relation to its commercial potential, but when Wild Bunch discovered that Noé had started to develop the film for Pathé instead of them, they said that they were willing to fund it. Since development went slowly at Pathé, Noé chose to not renew his contract with the studio and accepted Wild Bunch's offer.
Enter the Void was produced under Fidélité Films, with 70% of the budget invested by Wild Bunch. French co-producers included Noé's company Les Cinémas de la Zone and the visual effects studio BUF Compagnie. It received pre-sales investment from Canal+ and funding from Eurimages. Additional co-production support was provided by Essential Filmproduktion of Germany and BIM Distribuzione of Italy. The total budget was 12.38 million euro. In retrospect, Noé called Irréversible a bank robbery, a film made in order to finance Enter the Void. He also saw it as a helpful technical exercise.
Casting
The decision to use English-speaking actors was made early. Since the film would be very visual, the director wanted audiences to be able to focus on the images, and not have to rely on subtitles. He later expressed his approval of the use of dubbed voice tracks in non-English speaking countries.The role of Linda was the first to be cast. Noé found Paz de la Huerta after holding auditions in New York City. "I met Paz and I really liked her. She had the profile for the character because she likes screaming, crying, showing herself naked—all the qualities for it." Due to a desire that Linda and Oscar should be believable as siblings, Nathaniel Brown, a non-professional, was cast because of his resemblance to Huerta. Noé feared that a professional actor would be frustrated by being shown almost exclusively from behind, but he felt that Brown, an aspiring director, would find it stimulating to merely be present on the set. Auditions were held for Westerners living in Japan for other Tokyo-based roles. Cyril Roy went to an audition with a friend only because he wanted to talk with the director, whose previous films he admired. Roy was cast as Alex, since Noé found his talkative personality suitable for the role. Noé said about Brown and Roy:
The thought of acting in a film had never even entered their minds. They're easy-going people, they have a good time in front of the camera and I don't think there was a single moment where either of them felt they were working. Paz, however, was definitely conscious of the fact that she was interpreting a role.