CLIMAX (2018)Movie Review

By Jeevan

BCJ

Gaspar Noé is a filmmaker who literally wants to show you hell on earth. He wants to lead you into the pit, to make the ultimate shocking spectacle of our violence and addiction and depravity. He did it in two sequences of “Irreversible,” his 2002 drama of degenerate psycho horror: At a nightclub, a man smashed someone’s face — over and over — with a fire extinguisher, until his entire head was turned into hamburger. (When I first saw the movie, it looked so real that I thought, for a moment, Noé had filmed an actual murder.) Then, in an empty tunnel, Noé staged a rape sequence in a hideously long and unflinching shot — one of the most excruciating scenes ever filmed. You were practically invited to debate the morality of what you were seeing, yet there was no denying the debauched mastery of the button-pushing.

“Climax,” Noé’s latest plunge into the forbidden zone, lets you touch, once again, the hot blue flame of his talent. For about 45 minutes, it’s a compelling movie, and with its ensemble cast of 20 young dancers, it feels like a new flavor for this artist of scandal. “Climax” is much better than either “Enter the Void” or “Love,” in which Noé worked so hard to shove everything to the extreme — that’s basically his brand — that more quite quickly become less. And less.

As a filmmaker, Noé is now a junkie of evil: He keeps reaching, through increasingly numb tolerance levels, for a higher high, and he has no idea when he’s crashing. Yet “Climax” works, at least when it’s willing to be a human drama. But then it sinks in that you’re watching “Fame” directed by the Marquis de Sade with a Steadicam.The movie opens with videotaped audition interviews of the dancers (seen on an old TV), who’ve been assembled in a troupe that’s scheduled to tour France and the U.S. They’re all in their early twenties, with very rad hair, and they’re a racially and sexually diverse crew, bursting, in different ways (some sullen, some punchy), with hipster street confidence.

The film then cuts to a dizzily choreographed dance sequence set in a dank rehearsal space (it looks like an empty wedding reception hall), set to throbbing ’90s EDM and photographed in a single hypnotically unblinking head-on shot.Except that I felt my jaw going slack, and began to miss the personalities from the first half of the movie. The trouble with watching characters go out of their minds on acid is that (duh!) we’re outside their minds, completely cut off from what they’re experiencing; the real movie is in their heads.

The dance music in “Climax” (Daft Punk, Aphex Twin) never stops, the way it kept pumping during the face-smash scene of “Irreversible,” and there’s no question that for Gaspar Noé, hell on earth looks like a Eurotrash dance club. But maybe it’s time that he turned the volume down and stopped trying to make the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah into the world’s most forbidden music video.