17/07/2021 - CANNES 2021: What a beautiful surprise: a minimalist, quietist, three-character drama about death and mourning, from Gaspar Noé, of all people

A round of applause for Gaspar Noé, if you will. As the history of cinema lopes by, year by year, even the finest directors at work seem to be beset by a particular anxiety of influence. Noé has his influences – he sometimes puts them in bold font, in on-screen text, in his work – but every time he comes out, there’s a concerted drive to reinvent what cinema can do formally, and how the elasticity of the medium enhances our sense of various subjects. He’s gone from sex to crime to dance and, here, in Vortex [+see also:
trailer
film profile], to death. Specifically, the lonely, sorrowful deaths befalling the ageing population of the “developed world”: and here, like in Michael Haneke’s Amour [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Michael Haneke
film profile], he examines love’s overlap and struggle with life’s great full stop. The film has premiered in Cannes Premiere – counter-intuitively, but still appropriately, in a screening commencing on the stroke of midnight.

Where Haneke had two high-end French thesps (Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant) to enact his passion play, Noé’s casting choices give a greater sense of naturalism and the quotidian. The suffering couple, whose actual names aren’t specified, are Dario Argento, the Giallo master little known for his on-screen acting; and Françoise Lebrun, famously a non-professional when she was cast in her lover Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore. Noé also, intelligently and originally, doesn’t attempt to evoke his actors’ filmic associations in any way, save for the fact that Argento’s character did work as a professional film critic before auteur success beckoned.

Cinema is a brilliant tool of disassociation: with an astounding sense of taste and maturity, Noé uses the simple formal strategy of a split screen to embody this end-of-life struggle. In a 2.35:1 frame, each lead actor occupies his or her own camera perspective, with a gap of black in the middle: it’s like a celestial CCTV feed. At the beginning, Argento’s character is more self-sufficient, and even able to crack on with a piece of work: an ambitious book about cinema’s relation to the unconscious. Lebrun’s character, a former psychiatrist and analyst, is touched by the dramatic irony of her mind’s complete succumbing to dementia. It’s a compelling and risky piece of acting, to simulate the symptoms of a neurodegenerative disease, but she brings it off. It’s as haunting to witness as anything in Noé’s work to date.

The couple has one son, Stéphane (Alex Lutz, actually famous for comedy roles), who makes the time-honoured plea for them to move into an assisted-living facility: you can tell he has their best interests at heart (it’s not a ploy to divest himself of responsibility, or a de facto locking them away). It would be unfair to reveal more, but we can observe that Noé has constructed a particular dramatic dialectic: what will survive of this withering bond, the mind or the heart, catastrophe or practicality? (As he even alludes to in an on-screen inter-title near the beginning.)

Here, the violence is all internal, the angst all interior, but the grace permanent. You can make literary comparisons, chiefly to Beckett’s obsession with recording devices and repetition, but Hamlet’s final words from Shakespeare’s play glow the strongest: “The rest is silence.” Argento and Lebrun’s first words in the film, on the terrace of the bohemian Parisian hovel, are also like the eloquent words of a great playwright, or even akin toDavid Lynch’s third series of Twin Peaks:
“Life is a dream, isn’t it?”
“Yes, a dream within a dream.”

Vortex is a co-production between France, Belgium and Monaco, staged by Rectangle Productions, Wild Bunch Production, Les Cinémas de la Zone, KNM, Artémis Productions, SRAB Films, Les Films Velvet and Kallouche Cinéma. Wild Bunch International is in charge of its international sales.