Enter the Void comes from another galaxy

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      Starring Nathaniel Brown and Paz de la Huerta. In English and Japanese. Rated R. Plays Friday to Monday, December 10 to 13, and Wednesday to Saturday, December 15 to 18, at the Vancity Theatre

      Who would have thought that the most nihilistic of the “French extremists” would make a movie partially based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead? Or that a filmmaker whose realism was once as stark as an autopsy report could create something so formally inventive that it makes 2046 look like South Park? Gaspar Noé has followed up his already astonishing Irreversible with a film so original that it looks like it comes from another galaxy.


      Watch the trailer for Enter the Void.

      Geographically, Enter the Void is centred in Tokyo. Well, sort of. Thanks to Marc Caro’s psychedelic sets and a camera that penetrates ceilings and walls with the ease of a ghost, Enter the Void feels more like a real-life anime than a trip to Edo.

      Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), the hero of the piece, is a drug dealer who gets killed by the Japanese police. And, no, this detail is not letting the cat out of the bag. Virtually all of Noé’s fourth feature takes place after Oscar’s death, a fact signified by the replacement of subjective camerawork with a series of dips and dives that give new meaning to the term God shot. Not quite ready to leave this vale of tears, our now voiceless narrator repeatedly visits the people he once loved, in particular his sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta).

      Haunted by incest, shaded by hard-core sex, and travelling through an alternately beautiful and louche drug dream, Enter the Void is like nothing you’ve ever seen before. Not all of it is brilliant; some of it is frankly ridiculous, while its singular lack of humour occasionally invites unintended laughs. So be it. This is a work of uncensored genius, so even its faults are part of its success.

      Many viewers will hate this movie with a visceral passion. That’s one reason why it’s a capital-M masterpiece.

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