Gaspar Noé shocks Filipino viewers at QCinema

This year's edition of QCinema International Film Festival has just wrapped up (Oct. 22-31 at Trinoma, Gateway and Robinsons cinemas), with one of its highlights being the Director in Focus section. Last year, the featured filmmaker was South Korea's Park Chan-wook and his Vengeance trilogy ("Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance", "Oldboy", "Lady Vengeance"). Filipino viewers were definitely treated to the brand of violence and nihilism that characterize Park's cinematic world. This year, that kind of "shock treatment" continued with France's enfant terrible Gaspar Noé and his trio of provocations: "Irreversible", "Enter the Void" and "Love 3D". This would certainly be the first time that cineastes will get to experience on the big screen the boundary-pushing cinema of Noé. It's like one's nightmare becoming larger-than-life. 

"Irreversible" (2002) instigated a walk-out when it premiered at the Cannes film festival, mainly due to its hard-to-watch rape scene of Monica Bellucci's character, all taking place in a nine-minute unbroken shot. And before that scene, a few minutes after the film began, another equally notorious scene occurred in which a man's face (the perpetrator of the rape) was repeatedly and relentlessly smashed to a pulp using a fire extinguisher by the victim's male friend and former beau. That brutal rape and the violent revenge that followed are the potent narrative forces that propel this bleak and unflinching film, which is being told in a reverse chronological order, consisting of about twelve long takes. "Irreversible" is bookended by the nihilist phrase "time destroys everything" - the first, uttered by The Butcher, a crossover character from Noé's earlier film "I Stand Alone" who's now serving time in prison for molesting his own daughter;the second, blasted onscreen in large, bold letters (the director's stylistic trademark). That phrase is the complete anti-thesis of that other, rather optimistic phrase in regards time, that it "heals everything". Looking at the film today, about a little over a decade after its initial release, its backwards timeframe (utilized as well by such films as David Jones' "Betrayal", Christopher Nolan's "Memento", François Ozon's "5x2") couldn't have served it better: by starting the film with the grisly and chaotic occurrences and ending it with an optimistic and hopeful scenario (the camera movement and the lighting change as well during the film's course), the feelings of regret and despair are all the more reinforced as we get to finally see the very things that the film's central crime has destroyed. It's like bluntly pointing to our faces that there are just some things that could've been avoided - or, inversely, can't be avoided. 

Meanwhile, "Enter the Void" (2009) is one hell of a drug-induced viewing experience, and when I say hell I am close to thinking Dante's Inferno. The influence of Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey", Noé's favorite and likewise a bonkers kind of film, can be mostly seen in this one: those acid-trip visuals and the major character (named Oscar, an American in Tokyo) undergoing through a "rebirth". It's either of the two things: the film will give you a "high" while watching it or being "high" is a prerequisite in order to fully appreciate it (not that we are condoning drug usage here). But looking beyond "Enter the Void"'s trippy visuals, it's in fact a compelling and immersive meditation on death, limbo, reincarnation, sin - and life. That it's entirely told, literally, from the main character's POV only reinforces the uneasy feeling that we are the ones who are actually going through a limbo. This is  by all means not an easy film to watch, with its dizzying and dazzling camerawork to mainly demonstrate the hovering around of a soul and its consistently nihilist view of humanity, despite on occasion being counterbalanced by Bach's divine Air on G sonata. The film clocks in at around 160 minutes, but it's certainly a fleeting moment compared to the eternal damnation that a lost soul might undergo as a retribution for the misdeeds done in this temporal life. 

And then "Love 3D" (2015) leaves nothing to the imagination and no stone unturned in its depiction of sex, probably the most extreme realization of Noé's idea of cinema du corps. Content-wise, the film isn't to be considered as totally revolutionary or controversial (even with having the sexual acts viewed in 3D, the viewers being thrust right into the couple's skins, reproductive organs and bodily fluids!). For we know that since cinema has learned to push boundaries, there have a been a great number of films that depict sex with such frankness and explicitness. If there's such a thing as being desensitized to violence in cinema, most probably there's also something called being "desensitized" to eroticism in films. Which, come to think of it, might be the whole point of Noé in graphically showing all possible sexual activities and partnerships in the film, for such a very extended length till we reach the point wherein we can't take all such eroticism anymore because we already feel nothing about them. In that sense, "Love 3D" is akin to Nagisa Oshima's seminal "In the Realm of the Senses", in which every form of sexual act between the master and the geisha is shown without let up that we just wish everything would stop. It has become apparent that Oshima and Noé are testing our very limits as to how far our senses will be tickled by all the eroticism and sexuality that we're seeing onscreen. They are trying to find out if carnal desires, the most primal of all human desires, can indeed be satiated. Ironic, though, that despite the complete banishment of all sexual inhibitions in "Love 3D", it's actually the most accessible of Noé's provocative and disturbing works. While it employs the nihilistic and defeatist kind of inner monologue found in "I Stand Alone", nowhere to be seen is the incredibly swirling and dizzying camerawork demonstrated in "Irreversible" and "Enter the Void" and the basic story is something that's quite relatable to anyone who has practically been or is in a relationship (a man torn between two women, the one with whom he has merely a child and the other whom he deeply and truly loves). The dialogues, for most of the time, are even too simplistic and obvious (not that subtlety has always been Noé's forte). Though the director could be admired for showing the pain and misery of heartbreak from the male point-of-view rather vividly. Yet, from someone who has consistently given us boundary-pushing and taboo-breaking specimens of the cinema du corps, one would expect seeing a love story that reaches the height of madness and depravity achieved by the likes of "In the Realm of Senses", André Téchiné's "Rendez-vous" and Jean-Jacques Beineix's "Betty Blue". 

It seems like QCinema is having a pattern of featuring truly envelope-pushing and out-of-the-box international filmmakers in its Director in Focus section, those bulls in the china shop, so to speak. Thus, Filipino cineastes can expect the likes of Lars von Trier, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Werner Herzog, Takashi Miike, Pedro Almodóvar, Catherine Breillat etc to be featured in this exciting section of the festival in years to come. 

Gaspar Noé's "Love 3D": The pain and misery of heartbreak, from a male perspective