Enter the Void

Enter the Void
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Gaspar Noé
Written by	Gaspar Noé
Produced by	Brahim Chioua Vincent Maraval Olivier Delbosc Marc Missonnier
Starring	Nathaniel Brown Paz de la Huerta Cyril Roy
Cinematography	Benoît Debie
Edited by	Gaspar Noé Marc Boucrot Jérôme Pesnel
Production companies	Fidélité Films Wild Bunch
Distributed by	Wild Bunch Distribution
Release dates	22 May 2009 (2009-05-22) (Cannes Film Festival) 5 May 2010 (2010-05-05)
Running time	154 minutes (25 fps) 161 minutes (24 fps)
Country	Template:Film France
Language	English
Budget	€ 12.38 million

Enter the Void is a French film released in 2009, written and directed by Gaspar Noé, labeled by Noé as a "psychedelic melodrama". It stars Nathaniel Brown in his debut role, Paz de la Huerta and Cyril Roy, also in his first role on film. The story is set in Tokyo and focuses on Oscar, a young American drug dealer who gets shot by the police, but continues to watch over his sister Linda and the events which follow on from his death during an out-of-body experience, floating above the streets of Tokyo and occasionally entering people's minds to observe their dreams. The entire film is shot from a first-person view, and occasionally has Oscar staring over his own shoulder as he observes moments from his past.

Having been Noé's dream project for many years, the production of Enter the Void was made possible due to the commercial success of Irréversible, the director's previous feature film. Enter the Void was primarily financed by Wild Bunch while Fidélité Films led the actual production. Co-producers included the visual effects studio BUF Compagnie, which also provided the computer-generated imagery. The film makes heavy use of imagery inspired by experimental cinema and psychedelic drug experiences. Principal photography took place on location in Tokyo and involved many complicated crane shots.

A rough version of the film premiered at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, but post-production work continued and it was not released in France until almost one year later. A cut down version was released in the United States and United Kingdom in September 2010. The critical response has been sharply divided.

Plot

The film opens with Oscar (Brown) living in Tokyo, supporting himself by dealing drugs, against the advice of his sister Linda (de la Huerta) and mentor Alex (Cyril Roy). Alex attempts to turn Oscar toward spirituality, with The Tibetan Book of the Dead, as opposed to drug abuse, which Alex claims will “fry (his) brain”. The first act follows Oscar’s nightly routine through strict point-of-view shots, including momentary "blackouts" to represent blinking, and extended sequences of drug-induced hallucination.

Oscar leaves his apartment to deliver drugs to Victor. He arrives at “The Void” bar, and sits down with a distressed Victor, who mutters “I’m sorry”, before they are swarmed by police officers. Oscar seals himself in a bathroom stall, and attempts to flush his gear. When the toilet does not work, he yells through the door that he has a gun and will shoot. In response, the police officers open fire, killing him.

Oscar's spirit rises above his body, and begins a journey through the city. It also travels through the past, revealing his traumatic life with Linda. We see the car crash that killed their parents, their separation through foster care, and eventual reconciliation in Tokyo. The plot weaves through time and space, revealing key information, such as Oscar’s sexual relationship with Victor’s mother.

In the final act, Oscar sees the devastating effect his death has had on friends and family. He watches as Linda receives the news and breaks down, Alex goes on the run, and Victor falls out with his parents. Victor goes to Linda's house to apologize for setting Oscar up, but Linda brutally rejects him. Interspersed through these scenes are more of Oscar's memories; his relationships with his sister and mother are both sexually suggestive. The last scene is ambiguous: it is shot from the perspective of a baby being born to Oscar's mother. It is left to the viewer to decide if this is a flashback to Oscar's birth, either genuinely or as a false memory, or if his life starts over again.

Themes

The cinematic experience itself is the main focus of the film, but there is also a central theme of emptiness. Gaspar Noé describes the film's subject as "the sentimentality of mammals and the shimmering vacuity of the human experience." The dramaturgy after Oscar's death is loosely based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead and ends with the spirit's search for a way to reincarnate. However the director, who considers himself completely non-religious, says that "the whole movie is a dream of someone who read The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and heard about it before being [shot by a gun]. It's not the story of someone who dies, flies and is reincarnated, it's the story of someone who is stoned when he gets shot and who has an intonation of his own dream."

Production

Development

The idea for the film had been growing since Noé's adolescence, when he first started to become interested in matters of death and existence. In his early twenties he saw Robert Montgomery's Lady in the Lake, a 1947 film shot entirely in a first person perspective, while under influence from psilocybin mushrooms. He then decided that if he ever made a film about the afterlife, that was the way it would be filmed. Noé had been writing on different versions of the screenplay for fifteen years before it officially went into production. The story had initially been more linear, and the drafts were set in different locations including the Andes, France and New York City. Tokyo was eventually chosen both because it could provide the colourful environments required for the film's hallucinogenic aspects, and because of Japan's repressive drug laws, which would add to the drama and explain the intensity of the main character's fear of the police.

Noé first tried to get the film funded in the early 2000s. Several producers responded positively to the script, and it was briefly under development for Tom Tykwer's German company X-Filme Creative Pool. It was however considered too expensive and the producers dropped out. Prospects changed when Irréversible from 2002 became a commercial success. Noé had written and directed Irréversible for StudioCanal, and it was sold internationally by their subsidiary Wild Bunch. When the producers at Wild Bunch asked Noé what he wanted to do next, he answered Enter the Void. The project was once again considered too expensive in relation to its commercial potential, but when Wild Bunch discovered that Noé had started to develop the film for Pathé instead of them, they changed their minds and said they were now willing to fund it. Since development went slowly at Pathé, Noé chose to not renew his contract with the studio and accepted Wild Bunch's offer.

Enter the Void was eventually produced under Fidélité Films with 70% of the budget invested by Wild Bunch. French co-producers included Noé's company Les Cinémas de la Zone and the visual effects studio BUF Compagnie. It received pre-sales investment from Canal+ and funding from Eurimages. Additional co-production support was provided by Essential Filmproduktion in Germany and BIM Distribuzione in Italy. The total budget was 12.38 million euro. In retrospection Noé compared Irréversible to a bank robbery made in order to finance Enter the Void, while it also served as a helpful technical exercise.

Casting

Actor		Role
Nathaniel Brown		Oscar
Paz de la Huerta		Linda
Cyril Roy		Alex
Emily Alyn Lind		young Linda
Jesse Kuhn		young Oscar
Olly Alexander		Victor
Ed Spear		Bruno
Masato Tanno		Mario

The choice to use English-speaking actors was made early on. Since the film would be very visual, the director wanted audiences to be able to focus only on the images, and not have to rely on subtitles. He later expressed his approval for the use of dubbed voice tracks in non-English speaking countries.

The role of Linda was the first to be cast. Noé found Paz de la Huerta after having held auditions in New York City. "I met Paz and I really liked her. She had the profile for the character because she likes screaming, crying, showing herself naked — all the qualities for it." It was a main concern that Linda and Oscar would be believable as siblings, so Nathaniel Brown, a non-professional, was then cast because of his resemblance to Huerta. Another reason for chosing Brown was that he wanted to become a director. Noé feared that a professional actor would be frustrated by being shown almost exclusively from behind, while an aspiring director would find it stimulating to merely be present on the set. For other Tokyo-based roles there were auditions held for westerners living in Japan. Cyril Roy went to an audition with a friend only because he wanted to talk with the director, whose previous films he admired. Roy was then cast as Alex since Noé found his talkative personality suitable for the role. Noé said about Brown and Roy: "The thought of acting in a film had never even entered their minds. They're easy-going people, they have a good time in front of the camera and I don't think there was a single moment where either of them felt they were working. Paz, however, was definitely conscious of the fact that she was interpreting a role."

Visual conception

Noé had tried various hallucinogens in his youth and used those experiences as inspiration for the visual style. One particular drug experience came later, when the director already was planning the film, and traveled to the Peruvian jungle to try Ayahuasca where it is legal. The experience was very intense and Noé regarded it "almost like professional research." Since few in the design team ever had taken a hallucinogen, it became necessary for Noé to collect and provide visual references in the forms of paintings, photographs, music videos and excerpts from films.

"There is nothing radically new, I took some techniques or narrative modes that were already in place from right to left in films, but used them in an obsessive manner."

—Gaspar Noé interviewed in Libération

Another important influence were the experimental films of Kenneth Anger, and in particular Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. Noé was recommended Anger's films in the early 1990s, while promoting the short film Carne, and quickly became a fan. Other influences from experimental cinema included the works of Jordan Belson and Peter Tscherkassky. Among mainstream films, the most prominent influence was 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is Noé's favourite film, and made him want to become a filmmaker after he saw it at the age of seven. Snake Eyes and other films by Brian De Palma also influenced Enter the Void with their hovering overhead shots which contributed to Noé's desire to make a whole film from a similar perspective.

There were two reasons for showing Oscar's head and shoulders within the frame during the flashback scenes, rather than letting the camera be the character's eyes. The first was that this is the way Noé usually sees himself in dreams and when recalling past events. It was also because he thought it would become easier to care for a character who is shown, as many point-of-view films in his opinion look unintentionally funny.

Filming

The crew filmed in Tokyo for three months from 19 October 2007. Filming continued in Montreal the following spring for the flashback scenes, which took four weeks and ended on 16 May 2008. The team went back to Tokyo twice for additional footage, once before the Montreal session and once when principal photography was over. Only four persons on the Tokyo set were French; everybody else in the crew was Japanese. Marc Caro worked as the supervisor of set designs in Tokyo. According to Noé, Caro had three months free after finishing Dante 01, his first effort as a solo director, so Noé asked him to come along to Japan.

The film was mainly shot on Kodak Vision3 250D film stock. Scenes where Oscar is alive were shot in the super 35 format with Arricam LT cameras, and the rest in super 16 with an Aaton XTR Prod. The cinematographer was Benoît Debie, who also shot Irréversible. Just like in Irréversible, Noé was reluctant to use artificial lighting that would destroy the illusion if the camera was turned around. Thanks to Tokyo's many neon signs very little additional lighting was required for the exterior scenes, despite that many of them were shot late at night. For the interior scenes Debie mainly used practical, in-frame light sources. Some exceptions were however made. One was that the moods of the characters were meant to be indicated by different colours, ranging from orange to purple with occasional greens. For this Debie used a set of red, green and blue automated disco lights which allowed for all different hues. The disco lights were easy to hide and also used for additional simulation of neon flashes, and to add a slight tint of red to the dressing-room scenes. Another exception were the strobe lights which were programmed together with the coloured lights. Blue colour was avoided throughout since the filmmakers did not associate it with dreams. Noé was the film's camera operator except for a few shots of Oscar running in the streets, as they required a taller cameraman. In those scenes the camera was held by Debie.

There was a 100-page screenplay which detailed plot developments and many of the visual traits, but very little dialogue was scripted, so the actors were asked to improvise their lines. Noé explained this approach: "For me, directing actors is just finding the right people and putting them in the right mood on the set and letting them go. ... I think the energy has to come on the set at the very last minute." Since much of the film was set in neighbourhoods known for gambling and prostitution, it was necessary to make agreements with the Yakuza before filming some of the on-location scenes, although there was no involvement of criminal organisations in the actual production. Studio scenes set in Tokyo were filmed at Toho Studios. More scenes than originally planned had to be filmed in studio because of the many complicated crane arrangements. Some of the overhead sequences took a full day to arrange and film. The scenes where Oscar is alive were mostly shot on real locations, but the scenes where he is a ghost were almost exclusively filmed in studio; this included revisits to the previous locations, which were replicated as large indoor sets. Other shots were taken from helicopters flying over the city.

Post-production

Enter the Void's post-production process lasted more than a year. Work on the digital effects was led by Pierre Buffin of BUF Compagnie. Every single scene in the film includes computer-generated imagery; even the flashback scenes, where the backdrops were digitally altered. Studio scenes, helicopter shots and CGI were forged together in the hovering sequences with the aim that the viewer should be unable to determine which is which. German experimental film director Thorsten Fleisch was hired to create the animated sparks seen in the film's opening titles. Noé discovered Fleisch through his 2007 film Energie! which used the same technique.

Noé initially asked Thomas Bangalter, a member of Daft Punk who had composed the music for Irréversible, to make an original soundtrack for Enter the Void. Bangalter was however occupied as the composer for Tron: Legacy. As a compromise he instead provided Noé with an arrangement of ambient sounds and samples of existing experimental music, from which Noé compiled what he visioned as "a maelstrom of sounds." One of the sources of inspiration for this was "Revolution 9" by The Beatles, a song which Noé describes as a work "where you catch the beginning of a note, or of a melody and then it's already somewhere else." The two main musical themes of the film are "Freak" by the British electro artist LFO, which is played during the opening credits, and a recording by Delia Derbyshire of Johann Sebastian Bach's "Air on the G String", which serves as the theme for Oscar's childhood and his relationship with Linda. The beginning of "ANS" by the British band Coil is heard during Oscar's first DMT trip. Other songs on the soundtrack include Toshiya Tsunoda's "Music for Baby", Alvin Lucier's "Music for Gamelan Instruments, Microphones, Amplifiers and Loudspeakers", as well as works by Denis Smalley, Lullatone and Zbigniew Karkowski.

Release

Gaspar Noé and Paz de la Huerta answering questions about the film at the Toronto International Film Festival.

A 163-minute version of the film competed in the main competition of the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. Noé said about the Cannes cut: "the film was like a baby of three months. I took it out of my belly to show it, flattered by Thierry Frémaux's invitation, but it was still in gestation. So I had to put it back into my belly, that is to say to tweak many details. A 155-minute cut was subsequently shown in September at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival. The final 154-minute cut premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and was released in French cinemas on 5 May 2010 through Wild Bunch Distribution. The Japanese release followed ten days later.

Distribution rights for the United States were picked up at Sundance by IFC Films. Trinity Filmed Entertainment is the British distributor. The film was released in both the United States and the United Kingdom on 24 September 2010. In both these countries the film was distributed without reel number seven, from a total of nine. The running time was therefore 137 minutes at 25 frames per seconds, which the director had instructed that the film should be played at, or 142 minutes at the more common 24 frames per seconds. Noé says that none of the cut material is essential for the film. He describes it as "some astro-visions, an orgy scene with Linda and the Japanese girl, the scene where you see [Oscar] waking up at the morgue and he thinks he's alive but he's not, and then the camera goes down the plughole where she's tipping his ashes." The reason the shorter versions exists was that Noé had promised the investors to make an alternative edit if the film ended up being longer than two hours and 20 minutes.

The film was released on DVD and Blu-ray Disc in France on 1 December 2010. Each edition featured both the longer and shorter versions.

Reception

Thomas Sotinel of Le Monde started his review by recalling the irritation the film caused upon its world premiere in Cannes, and compared the cut he had seen there to the final version: "In all honesty, the difference does not jump to my eyes. Of course, the film seems more consistent, but that may be because we've already traveled this maze once. While leaving, we might remain calmer, but still amazed by the mixture of exuberant invention and puerility." A positive review came from L'Express, written by Laurent Djian, who compared the film to 2001: A Space Odyssey, and applauded how he found the strobe lights hypnotising in a way that influenced the perception of time. "In 2010, no other [French] filmmaker than Gaspar Noé can shoot with such mastery, nor draw us into a vortex of sensations as vertiginous." Ouest-France's critic on the other hand was immensely bored by the film, calling it "a padding of simple ideas, stereotypes and cliches in a heap of contrived and vain images who think they're technical prowess. Soporific cinema."

Upon the Japanese release, the critic writing for The Japan Times reflected: "If Lost in Translation is the film you'd make when all you know about Japan are the pampered press junkets at Shinjuku 5-star hotels, then Enter the Void is what you would make if you never got beyond the Roppongi pub-crawl." While the review was largely negative, the author was still impressed by the visual depiction of the Japanese capital: "Visually, much of the film is stunning ... and the art design by Marc Caro (Delicatessen) takes Tokyo's love of neon gaudiness to a surreal extreme".

As of 19 November 2010, the film had an aggregated approval of 71% from 69 English-language reviews collected at Rotten Tomatoes, with an average rating of 6.8 out of ten. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave the film a perfect rating of five stars, and made a comparison to Irréversible, which he had disliked: "Enter the Void is, in its way, just as provocative, just as extreme, just as mad, just as much of an outrageous ordeal[.] ... But despite its querulous melodrama and crazed Freudian pedantries, it has a human purpose the previous film lacked, and its sheer deranged brilliance is magnificent. ... Love him or loathe him – and I've done both in my time – Gaspar Noé is one of the very few directors who is actually trying to do something new with the medium, battling at the boundaries of the possible." Andrew Male rated the film two out of five in Empire. Male called it "technically stunning", but also "dreadfully acted, tediously ‘profound’ and painfully overlong", and accused its director of misogyny. The Village Voice's Karina Longworth had several reservations about the film. She thought the characters lacked emotional depth and called the story "a lame fusion of stoner lifestyle, sexual fetish, and philosophical inquiry", but still ended the review: "I could stare at this movie for days and not get tired of the sensation. A mash-up of the sacred, the profane, and the brain-dead, Enter the Void is addictive." Jen Chaney of The Washington Post thought the film was successful as an "attempt to transport moviegoers to a hallucinatory version of the hereafter unlike anything they've ever witnessed on film", but, "The problem is that it's also the most excruciating sit in recent cinematic memory. And no, the fact that it's intentionally excruciating doesn't make it less excruciating."

Enter the Void won the Special Jury Award and the prize for Best Cinematography at the 2009 Sitges Film Festival. It received the main award for best film at the 2010 Neuchâtel Film Festival. This especially delighted Noé since one of the jury members in Neuchâtel was Douglas Trumbull, the special effects supervisor of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

External links

Official

• Official website Template:Fr icon
• Official UK website
• Enter the Void at IFC Films

Database

• Le Temps Detruit Tout - Gaspar Noe Database
• Enter the Void at AllMovie
• Enter the Void at Box Office Mojo
• Enter the Void at IMDb
• Enter the Void at Rotten Tomatoes

Production

• Energie! at Vimeo (contains rapidly flickering lights). The experimental film that prompted Gaspar Noé to hire Thorsten Fleisch to the production crew.