Devin Gordon

<h1>Gaspar Noé makes the kind of movies that can end a relationship.</h1>

Let’s say you invite a special someone over to Netflix and chill with the aid of Noé's breakthrough film, “Irréversible.” It caused a stir at Cannes in 2002 and wildly exaggerated rumors spread that — quelle horreur! — 250 people walked out. Others fainted. Once they came to, though, lots of them called it virtuosic, daring and original. So you and your date settle in for something nice and transgressive ... and within minutes you are watching a man getting his face bashed in — all the way in — with a fire extinguisher and then, a few scenes later, a woman getting raped for 10 agonizing unedited minutes, and by the time the credits roll, voilà, you’re single again.

Or let’s say you and a friend and a bag of shrooms decide to check out Noé's trippy exploration of the afterlife, “Enter the Void” (2010), set in Tokyo, filmed from the vantage point of a young drug-dealing American before, during and after he’s shot to death in a bar. For 150 minutes you see through his eyes as he floats like a ghost through the city’s sex clubs and drug dens. Sounds like a trip! And it is! But after the second or third hallucination sequence, and especially after the aborted fetus scene, you and your friend are no longer friends.

It’s hard to imagine getting anyone to come with you to see “Love,” Noé's next film. There’s nothing scarring about it, but it does feature lots of actual penetrative sex, including one shot of an ejaculating penis filmed from the perspective of the woman’s vagina. This seems like a good time to mention that Noé filmed it in 3D.

Which brings us to “Climax,” Noé's new film. By this point, critics greet a new Gaspar Noé movie with a mixture of anticipation and dread, and afterward it can be hard to tell if they loved it or hated it. Usually both. His films have been called “absolutely moronic” and “sneeringly superior and nihilistic.” Noé loves the hate, and so it was seen as some kind of prank when he scheduled “Climax’s” premiere at Cannes last spring for 8:30 on a Saturday morning, bright and early, and refused to provide any kind of synopsis.

This time, though, it was Noé who was in for the surprise.

“Climax” was a dance-hall musical of sorts: “'Fame’ directed by the Marquis de Sade,” as the Variety critic later described it. It was short and simple. First there’s an exhilarating dance rehearsal in an abandoned boarding school, featuring music by Daft Punk and Aphex Twin, then a slow dive into an LSD-spiked-sangria, party-gone-wrong nightmare — an allegorical vision of beauty and harmony, followed by total social collapse.

Nearly everyone in the audience that morning loved it. Hardly anyone walked out.

Noé was crestfallen. Now, though, with the benefit of time and reflection, Noé has learned to see the bright side of people enjoying his films and even recommending them to people he likes. In this respect, “Climax” is a first for him.

“This is the only movie of mine that I can give them,” he said recently via Skype from his Paris apartment. He is 55, bald with a thick mustache and a perma-scowl that he uses to sucker-punch you with really good black humor. “The other ones had almost no happy parts.”

“Climax” begins with the happy part. A troupe of street dancers, nonprofessional actors mostly, aside from “Kingsman’s” Sofia Boutella, a dancer herself, gather to rehearse a new routine. The scene is a classic movie-musical showstopper, but what makes this one so singular is that customary Noé dread, the certainly that something awful this way comes.

And then it comes. A mystery person spikes the sangria, and Noé begins lighting fuses all over the room. A man hits on Boutella’s character a bit too aggressively, and we start to get nervous. A woman urinates directly onto the dance floor, and we start to get alarmed. The son of one dancer, maybe 8 years old, wanders near the punch bowl, and we start to panic.

“One reaction that I didn’t expect — many friends who are big party monsters came out of the movie totally depressed,” Noé recalled. “They said, ‘I have to go back home. You just reminded me of the worst moments of my life, all my blackouts and fights.’” He grinned, as though this maybe delighted him, then he shrugged. “It’s just a movie.” Like David Lynch’s “Eraserhead,” one of Noé's own favorites, “it’s written in the language of nightmares, but then you come out, you’re all clean.”

“Climax” began as a documentary about street dancers — Noé loves dancing — and he asked Los Angeles choreographer Nina McNeely to help him cast it and choreograph the dance sequence. He also asked her to star, but she declined. “There was no script,” he explained. “Also, she had seen ‘Irréversible.’”

Then, just as they were about to start filming, a blizzard hit Paris, and Noé was struck by a mental image of a woman crawling through a field of snow, screaming, panicked, filmed from above, until she collapses. In a blink, Noé's documentary became A GASPAR NOÉ FILM. But it’s his most mature film, though it’s maybe mature in the same way that serial killers get more effective at carving up their victims.

To Noé's many haters, though, his work too often crosses the line between provocative and juvenile. “Love” wasn’t meant to be funny, but some audiences snickered at its more sophomoric sex scenes, in particular a threesome with an innocent blond next-door neighbor, a porn convention so on the nose, wocka-wocka guitar and all, it had to be a spoof, right? Nope.

“I just tried to portray reality,” he said. “My friends tell me there’s nothing artificial — threesomes are not so uncommon. Probably less now than in the ‘70s or ‘80s. There is an animal instinct force in humans that creates passion. When you love sometimes you cross a border.”

Noé's gaze is unapologetically male, and so is he, and he sees no use pretending that this isn’t a garden-variety straight male fantasy. Enjoying a Gaspar Noé film requires acknowledging that he’s probably right.

Which brings us to the other big reason Noé's films are so often despised: His protagonists are often despicable. It’s only fair to point out that Noé detests them, too, despite the fact that most of them, like Boutella’s thwarted pursuer in “Climax,” are based on him, or at least the most odious version of him. In Noé's movies, men destroy everything. “They’re pretentious, and they always end up losing.” He is drawn to these men, he explained, “because I think there are more losers in this world than winners.”

To hear Noé tell it, he was put on this earth to provoke. Born in Buenos Aires, the son of a celebrated Argentine painter, Luis Felipe Noé, known as Yayo, he lived on Bleecker Street in SoHo in Manhattan until he was 5 and has fond memories of peeing from his balcony onto passers-by below. His family returned to Argentina, then fled to Paris in 1976 to escape the coup.

As a teenager Noé discovered Kubrick and Scorsese. His hero was Travis Bickle, Robert De Niro’s deranged antihero from “Taxi Driver.” “Especially the second part,” he said, then cackled madly. He studied filmmaking at Louis Lumière College, showed a horse being slaughtered in his first movie — a 40-minute short called “Carne,” about an incestuous butcher and his mute daughter — then fell in love with his producer, now wife, Lucile Hadzihalilovic. (They do not have children.)

From his earliest work, Noe possessed a redemptive gift for tenderness and intimacy, and for using the full arsenal of film language to evoke life’s most extreme sensations, not just the horrifying ones.

Even before the LSD kicks in, “Climax” plays like a fever dream, only the drug is pure kinetic energy generated by dancers doing what they love. Near the grim finale, a quotation flashes on the screen: “Life is a collective impossibility.”

“This movie,” though, Noé said, “proves the contrary.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="6e3bb654-9f3d-47bc-9876-6f23ddf36e45" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/27/movies/gaspar-noe-climax.html">The New York Times</a>.

He Lives to Provoke. What Happens When His Film Isn't Hated?

It’s hard to imagine getting anyone to come with you to see “Love,” Noé's next film.

He lives to provoke, what happens when his film isn't hated?

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Devin Gordon

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He lives to provoke, what happens when his film isn't hated?