For certain directors, a project may gestate for a while, such as Inception, which Nolan said took eight years, or Tarantino's 'Basterds' a decade. For Gaspar Noe, he tops them all, with his film being worked on and re-tooled over the course of *twenty* years. This goes without saying that some of this was based around waiting for the proper visual effects; Enter the Void has so many shots that are done with CGI and with a kind of vfx-led camera approach that it's hard to count what is "really" shot and what was done on a computer. But this doesn't take away from what works about Noe's first film since Irreversible. No, there are other things to take away that don't work.
In terms of artistic ambition and a deranged glee at keeping the audience on a hook for 'what will happen next', Noe goes to take the cake for the year - yes, even more than Nolan's mind-trip. This is such a mind-trip that it could give regular trippers a run for their head- shop money. And this all isn't hyperbole: this is a true drug movie, where a viewer is taken along on a character's journey - if it even is a character at all - and the psychedelic atmosphere created in Tokyo.
As far as the plot goes, there is either very little of it or a lot of it. It starts with Oscar (Nathanial Brown), who is a drug dealer, leaving his apartment he shares with his sister, Linda (Paz de la Huerta), and meeting his buyer, some young kid. But when he's set up, and, supposedly, is shot by the cops in the bathroom - this is not a spoiler inasmuch as this is the start of the movie pretty much - he's dead... but then the rest of the movie goes on, and we see still from the first-person POV that the film started on continue. The difference is that now the POV angle keeps cascading and flying in the air, almost always getting over-head angles on characters talking across rooms and skylines and buildings.
There is still more story for Noe to tell, however. Oscar and Linda's back-story, for one, is given some great depth (still that first-person POV angle, only shot from behind Brown's head instead of his eyes). It's an extremely sad tale, almost too tragic to call melodrama, as Oscar and Linda go from a relatively happy childhood to their parents dying in a head-on collision with themselves in the backseat, and Linda being sent to a foster home away from Oscar. They reconnect when they're adults in Tokyo, and are all they have left in the world - that is until drugs and stripping get in the way, as well as a sub-plot involving a local British woman and her son who is also deep into drugs.
In terms of the story itself, Noe actually has a firmly constructed and at least mostly cohesive tale to tell. It's in the way he goes about it that will makes one's head spin. Make no mistake, this is an "art" film, or an experimental film or what have you. For those who found Inception too 'Hollywood' or possibly too straightforward, then come and get it. The real confounding sense of Noe's cinema comes forth in those pirouetting shots, which sometimes seem to be all of one single shot but in fact are probably many (they're separated by shots that literally dive into 'things' like a light or a plant or, at one disturbing moment, a fetus on a table). It's kind of staggering to see this control and exhilaration in many of these shots, taking into account the hyper- realistic settings in rooms and streets of Tokyo, and the electric- lights and psychedelia brought around by drugs.
Early on Noe gets the audience right into the swing of it (not counting credits) with Oscar's trip with DMT: one may feel as if they're in a combination of fractals, that screen-saver on the Windows Media Player, and a legitimate drug trip. But this is only the start of shots and angles and scenes that play out sometimes over simply a bright white or yellow light. While this holds the attention for the first two thirds of the film, when it goes on and on in that last half hour or so (I wasn't sure how long and was at least attentive not to check a watch), it drags on and becomes tedious. It's hard to say exactly where to cut, though Noe reportedly has a "shorter" cut than the uncut 160 minute version. But for all of the deranged fun in seeing such a conceptual style executed, and always in mind with it being possibly a floating consciousness or just a super-extended drug trip (or both), it wears thin, even with the excess nudity and sex at the "Love Hotel" in the final reel.
Enter the Void is a mixed bag of treasures and disappointments. Noe has so much going for him with his aesthetic that he almost neglects his actors. De la Huerta (previously all-nude in The Limits of Control) shows how well she can act here, and helps give a deep reservoir of emotional heft in the scenes that need it. And supporting actors and characters, such as the French drug-friend and that little guy Victor, all do what they can to make scenes more dramatically powerful than they have any right to be given the style over substance. But when both come together, it's truly amazing, and occasionally brilliant stuff, such as the repeated shock of the car crash or (some of) the up-front sex. It's like a remake of Requiem for a Dream by a film student in love with the over-head roaming shots from Minority Report. It's depressing, fun, dull, high and with an ending that is just pure WTF. Cult film fans rejoice!
