"Climax" Gaspar Noé: a literary work on the dangers of drugs, disguised as an experimental art film

The film "Climax" by Gaspar Noé, the director of the paintings Irreversibility and Love, tells of a farewell dance party where something went wrong. I believe that Noé made an energetic, beautiful and technically virtuosic film - but, alas, could not refuse it from moralizing and pseudo-intellectual references.

Well, I have to admit: "Climax" is the best movie of Gaspar Noé. Just like his previous 3D opus, “Love” was the worst. Having coped with unlimited ambitions and partly overcoming narcissism (by the way, for Climax Noé received the second prize of the festival in Swiss Neuchatel for his career, the French-Argentine director made his most concentrated, energetic and simple - in the best sense of the word - picture. which was rewarded by unanimous praise of critics and the prestigious Art Cinema Award. In the main competition, Noé was not taken this time.

However, to compete in the competition Noé still no one with whom. Such an impressive and simultaneous annoying combination of technical virtuosity and aesthetic originality with defiant emptiness is still to be found. You can find similar combinations in clip-making or advertising art, but in the full-length author's film Noe is truly unique. Together with the Belgian operator Benoît Debie, every time they get up so that the viewer's eyes climb out of orbits. Moreover, the brain, lulled by a monotonous techno soundtrack, is gradually turned off. Well, many people like it.

"Climax" is precisely this feeling that the heroes of the film seem to experience in the first fifteen minutes when they dance. The idea of this conception is ingenious in its elementary nature: the camera - this time disciplined, even though the workshop - was imprinted on a twenty-hour non-stop dance marathon, carefully staged and rehearsed, but retaining the appearance of loose club spontaneity. Words are superfluous, music is rudimentary and rhythm is irresistible. Unable to break away. It is a pity that the whole movie could not be so.

The dance is finished, the dancers rest. Moreover, they sip sangria, where, as it turns out soon, one of them added something bad. Very strong. We gradually learn that the nineties are in the courtyard (obviously, in France they were dashing for someone), and the troupe is about to go across the ocean on tour to the USA, and the disco is actually the last rehearsal before leaving. As soon as the viewer finds out, tomorrow is no longer important. There is only here and now. Everything is not in itself: some sick, others want immediate sex, others, it seems, are dying, but out of habit continue their dance macabre, smoothly turning into convulsions. Moreover, the morning is not soon, and it is unlikely that everyone will live to see it. Moreover, among helpless and aggressive adults there is a child who also sipped a forbidden drink.

Actually, that is all. "Climax" could have been a brilliant short film, but instead its author made a painfully long and plotless techno-trip about the dangers of drugs - what else? Enjoying the aesthetics of vice and the ethics of sin Gaspar Noé film after film awkwardly melts into retirement moralism. He does it sincerely or in order not to have problems with censorship, is unknown. Moreover, it does not matter.

Climax’s advantage over Nor’s “Irréversible” or “Enter the Void” is in the concreteness of this film, inspired by a real incident. There is no attempt to metaphysics and not a single reference to the sacred texts. The only visible (and successful) image is a giant canvas with the colors of the French tricolor, which constitutes the background for a DJ installation. The blue-white-red symbol is not the plot itself, in the course of which people expose their animal nature, discredits so much France as freedom, equality and fraternity: it turns out that the extreme degree of freedom allows neither equality nor fraternity.

It is a shame that the director did not want to adhere to the purity of the statement and provided the film with an unnecessary prelude - an interview with the dancers on a video camera (a possible reference to “Idioterne” Lars von Trier, the author, whom Noé obviously wants to outdo the radicalism). In these scenes you don’t want it, but you’ll unwittingly read the titles of books and videotapes, next to the stacks of which the heroes of the future drama share their impressions of the dance. Immediately it becomes embarrassing, as if looking into your own cluttered bedroom as a student: “Querelle” and “Un Chien Andalou”, “Suspiria”.