Vortex (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by Lawrence Garcia

Produced by Edouard Weil, Vincent Maraval, and Brahim Cioua; directed by Gaspar Noé; screenplay by Gaspar Noé; cinematography by Benoît Debie; edited by Denis Bedlow and Noé; sound by Ken Yasumoto; starring Françoise Lebrun, Dario Argento, Alex Lutz, and Kylian Dheret. Color, French dialogue with English subtitles, 142 min. A Utopia release.

Vortex, Argentine-born French provocateur Gaspar Noé’s latest feature, opens in an atmosphere of rare calm. An opening-credits scroll gives way to a clear blue sky, from which the camera tilts down to survey a set of Parisian apartments. The next two shots give us frames within frames: a pair of complementary views of windows directly opposite each other, through which an elderly couple (played by Françoise Lebrun, of The Mother and the Whore fame, and Italian master Dario Argento) exchange a few words. The images suggest two opposed apartments in neighboring buildings, calling to mind the spatial arrangement of Ernst Lubitsch’s So This Is Paris (1926). But when Argento and Lebrun’s characters (credited as “The Father” and “The Mother,” respectively) meet up a few seconds later and together head out onto a garden terrace for a cup of tea, we are led to abandon our initial assumption about how the space is put together. Throughout the film, we will more than once be placed in a similar position, forced to reconsider our spatial coordinates. For now, though, the serenity of the moment is all. “Life’s a dream, isn’t it?” she says. “A dream within a dream,” he replies.

As one might expect from the director of Irreversible (2002), however, the dream cannot last. Giving us a presentiment of what is to come, a clip from Françoise Hardy’s “Mon amie la rose” plays on screen, its lyrics—originally a poem written in response to the death of actress Sylvia Lopez—expressing the transience of human life. Mortality on the mind, we are then presented with the names and birth years of the main cast, after which we transition to an overhead shot of Argento and Lebrun in bed. The latter soon awakes in distress, as if aware that a bold black line is at that very moment dropping down from the top edge of the frame, bisecting the film’s CinemaScope canvas into two roughly square images. As the couple goes about their day, we learn that Lebrun’s character, a former psychiatrist, is suffering from Alzheimer’s; that Argento’s, a film journalist, has a heart condition; and that neither is far from shuffling off this mortal coil. The remainder of the film’s 142 minutes is largely devoid of dramatic incident or narrative surprise [spoiler alert, however, for the latter portions of this review], hardly deviating from depicting its central couple’s mundane activities and their slow, painful deterioration. (As many have observed, the dramatic setup recalls that of Michael Haneke’s 2012 film Amour, with Argento and Lebrun in the Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva roles.) What may initially have seemed like a dream becomes something more like Coleridge’s “nightmare life in death.”

Noé’s characteristically tacky way of putting all this is to dedicate Vortex “to all those whose brains will decompose before their hearts.” The line is in any case entirely in keeping with Noé’s methods, which have long been preoccupied not so much with the workings of the intellect, as with the endless enigmas of the body. His employment of stereoscopy in his much-derided 3-D porno Love (2015) expresses not just puerility or childishness, but how our binocular vision and depth perception are bound up with all the essential functions of self-preservation. Likewise, Climax (2018), which sees a dance rehearsal descend into an LSD-fueled freakout, conveys not just the dynamic possibilities of having a body, but also the terror that comes with losing control of it. In terms of physical health, the elderly couple at the center of Vortex occupy the opposite end of the spectrum from Climax’s troupe of young dancers. But in both films, Noé’s focus remains the same, his efforts aimed at conveying the sharp shock of having one’s habits unmoored from their usual spatio-temporal coordinates.

Across Noé’s oeuvre, this manifests via a heightened formal immediacy. To watch his films is to be made acutely aware of the cinema’s capacity to manipulate our experience of space and time. There is, to start with, the way he piles on references to films that care not a whit for conventional narrative logic: Climax’s preshow prologue features VHS tapes of Possession (1981), Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), and Argento’s Suspiria (1977), while Vortex includes clips from Vampyr (1932) and Solaris (1972). Beyond this, Noé’s own films routinely compel us to revise our spatio-temporal presuppositions, reminding us that our ability to engage with cinema is neither predetermined nor fixed, but acquired and developed. Most every film of Noé’s operates with some upfront formal or structural conceit: the bang-zoom transitions in I Stand Alone (1998), in which a loud gunshot accompanies jarring changes of perspective; the extended point-of-view reverie of Enter the Void (2009); his penchant for camera movements and compositions that reconfigure our sense of gravity à la 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); and especially his signature blink-edits, in which shots are connected by brief seconds of black, suggesting the operations of a perceiving eye. These formal maneuvers all force us to ask who (or what) could see or experience in this way? Moreover, what does it mean that we can learn to comprehend such unusual presentations of space and time? What does it mean that after a period of acclimation, we feel capable of navigating the spaces they represent? 

In Vortex, the split-screen conceit manages a variety of striking effects, each of which affords an occasion to consider such questions. For one thing, the two-screen setup calls attention to our conventional assumptions of simultaneity: When one frame “blinks” to a new perspective, while the other does not, we instinctively preserve a sense of real-time progression; only when both cut forward at the same time do we allow for a temporal leap. For another, the two-screen effects actively foreground the spatial coordination that goes on in all movie viewing, frustrating our attempts to synthesize the film’s disparate views into an organic whole. In the film’s most disorienting scenes, its screens seem to present two halves of the same location (a dining table, a couch), except that the continuity we assume is false, and the shots never quite add up. In the most striking variation of this, which comes when the couple’s son (Alex Lutz) broaches the possibility of their moving into a care home, the apparent coherence of the image varies with depth, creating a disorienting spatial tension. The foreground plane, in which the three actors are initially arranged in a row, appears as seamless continuity, while the bookshelves that line the background jut out at incompatible angles. Only when Lebrun leans back in exhaustion, her visage doubling in the split-screen setup, definitively breaking the illusion, does the tension finally resolve.

It would be easy to dismiss such formal effects as frivolous, indulgent gimmickry—an assessment that Noé himself may at times reinforce when he resorts to crude shock effects, as in the opening “Rectum” passage of Irreversible. But at their best, Noé’s films shock not with their violence of incident, but with their intensified immediacy, the hyperawareness they create about what it is to really see. In Vortex’s most effective passages, we find our habitual systems of action suspended, and in the process discover that our ability to navigate space is not given once and for all, and that our spatio-temporal assumptions are in fact learned. And for Noé, the great draw of the cinema is its ability to incarnate this moment of discovery. His long-standing admiration of Space Odyssey thus becomes entirely comprehensible, for his films present the viewer with a challenge like the one advanced by Kubrick’s masterpiece: what Annette Michelson once put as an invitation “to rediscover the space and dimensions of the body as theatre of consciousness,” an invitation to revel in “a knowledge which is carnal.”

Vortex, then, is not some dubious effort to replicate how someone with dementia or Alzheimer’s experiences the world. Rather, it is an attempt to restore the strangeness of perception, which we take for granted, and which we feel only when we are forcibly unmoored from a lifetime of habit. This intention does not automatically absolve Noé of the burdens of depicting illness and disease, and it is possible to feel that he activates the couple’s health conditions (her Alzheimer’s, his heart problems) as a suspense-generating machine. Still, a better understanding of Noé’s interests should make clear that despite his depictions of human behavior as a mass of insatiable impulses, his films constantly look beyond a world of brute materialism. No doubt his fascination with birth and death can come across as boneheaded and adolescent, as when he drops intertitles like “Birth is a unique opportunity” and “Death is an extraordinary experience” partway through Climax. But like all simple-minded observations, these statements contain a truth that the myopia of knowledgeability is apt to miss, conveying a feeling for the opaqueness of the world, a conviction that life contains mysteries that no scientific or mechanistic explanation will ever dispel. Indeed, they suggest that the desire to plumb the depths of lived experience, the desire to go “beyond the infinite,” as in Space Odyssey, is the most human, and therefore the most real, thing there is.

The peculiar thing about the infinite, of course, is that it cannot be directly represented. In Enter the Void, Noé’s most sustained attempt to do so, the camera performs more swooping, zero-gravity movements than any film this side of Michael Snow’s La Région Centrale (1971). But whenever it seems close to arriving at a representation of the infinite, it eventually ends up at another finite representation, another determinate picture of space and time. What one eventually realizes is that whether one is working with one, two, or twenty cameras, the infinite can only ever be symbolized. This understood, the continual plays between flatness and depth throughout Noe’s oeuvre—from his effective use of on-screen text to the dazzling memory-slideshow movement of Enter the Void—take on a special significance. The bold black line dividing its Scope frame is Vortex’s most obvious expression of visual flatness: an insistent reminder of the physical limitations of the cinema. But with its continual challenges to how we navigate space and time, its continual incitements to a rediscovery of what it means to see, Vortex illustrates that the nature of cinema as a medium cannot be reduced to one system of space and time, still less to a physical property of things. With this in mind, we may understand what French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty means when he writes that depth is not a third dimension. Likewise, we might understand that the depth of lived experience, like the depth of cinema as an art, is to be found not in any predetermined notion of measure, but in that very effort to go beyond the infinite.

Toward the end of Vortex, after the couple has passed on, we are presented, in this film of insistent flatness, with two final sets of slide shows: the first during a memorial service, consisting of old photos of the couple; the second for the audience, consisting of the film’s now-empty locations, stripped bare of their contents and the lives to which they were attached. The camera then rises, like a soul in flight, above the Parisian quarter the couple once inhabited, before turning the landscape upside down and fading to white. This final image inevitably recalls the deaths of Argento’s and Lebrun’s characters, each of which were punctuated by slow fades to an empty screen, a blank, opaque surface. But precisely because of this, it is impossible to read the white screen as mere blankness, as conveying only absence. Indeed, it becomes here a symbol of the infinite—a glimpse of a realm where space and time no longer pertain, where matter dissolves into memory, and where the visible world is drawn into the vortex of a dream.

Lawrence Garcia is a freelance film critic with bylines in Cinema Scope, Reverse Shot, MUBI’s Notebook, and other publications. He is currently pursuing a Master’s in Cinema and Media Studies at York University.

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