GASPAR NOÉ - CINEMA’S “ENFANT TERRIBLE”

enfant terrible

/ˌɒ̃fɒ̃ tɛˈriːbl(ə)/

noun

a person who behaves in an unconventional or controversial way.
"the enfant terrible of contemporary art"

Contains spoilers

Gaspar Noé is no stranger to provocation. In fact, the French director seems to delight in finding opportunities to make his audience squirm. This innate ability to propagate shock in cinema-goers coupled with his coarse subject matter has resulted in the French director being commonly referred to as one of cinema’s enfant terrible. However, this abrasiveness that seems to ooze from Noé’s work is not merely gratuitous in nature, and it would be reckless to treat it as such. Noé has a definite view of the world, and he intends on sharing it with us.

“Gaspar Noe’s movies wrestle with content from some of the darker corners of society, that are often left unaddressed, forcing viewers to assess themselves and question our engrained views.”

Gaspar Noé was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina to painter Luis Felipe Noé and mother Nora Murphy. His family later emigrated to France in 1976 to avoid the military dictatorship which began to rule Argentina during this time. While he later went on to study film at Louis Lumière College, he has stated that his interest in film was pricked long before this. A friend’s uncle who worked in a cinema would let a young Noé in to watch films almost every day (and self-admittedly Noé would often watch films he wasn’t supposed to), however, it was when he was brought to see Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey at the age of seven that the future director’s life changed.

Noé likens the experience to being on drugs, and accredits it as his first contact with hallucinogenic feelings as well as being one of his most life-changing experiences. Without this ‘trip’ Noé claims that he would have never become a director, going on to say that this unshakeable sensation was what caused him to want to take control of those mind-bending tactics and appoint himself as the puppet-master, giving himself the power to recreate similar feelings in others.

Noé proved to be a man of his word, and the disruptive director does not shy away from pulling all the strings which he has at his disposal to illicit strong emotional responses within his viewers: sex, drugs, violence are but a few of the socially taboo themes which frequent the screen in his films, but it is not purely for the thrill of shock which Noé selects these themes as ingredients for his work. The movie menace wrestles with content from some of the darker corners of society that are often left unaddressed, forcing viewers to assess themselves and question our engrained views .

One area in which the unconventional director dances with regularly is the theme of death. Noé’s body of work does not treat death as something that should be shied away from or censured in society. In fact, he is annoyed by this dogma, whereby death is always viewed as a negative, stating that “if you are suffering or in pain, death is the best thing that can happen.” While this message does hold logic, it is not an easy one for our animalistic instincts to grapple with.

However this is exactly Noé’s desired intention; to not bend the knee to cinema’s pleasantries by creating the craved comfort of a typical cinema experience, but to confront the viewer, and force us to grapple with questions which may not be the most consoling but are undoubtedly some of the most beneficial for our growth. As it could be argued that it isn’t always necessarily about “enjoying” what we are seeing but allowing ourselves to be thrust into the darker corners of the world with the hope of coming out on the other side with a more developed view both of ourselves and the world in which we inhabit.

We can see Noé’s views of death and its connotations take form in numerous ways throughout his films, as he uses the themes of life, reincarnation, and their relationship with each other to explore it. For example in his 1991 short Carne which tells the story of a troubled butcher, his harsh opening immediately thrusts his thought process onto us with an opening that features what has become almost a hallmark of a Gaspar Noé film; a warning title. We are then met with the real footage of a horse being killed in a slaughterhouse, which precedes the live footage of a baby being born. While the images on the screen are undoubtedly shocking, they do serve a definite purpose in beckoning us towards Noé’s views of how life can in fact blossom from death.

Similarly, this motif is explored again in the X-rated director’s first full-length film I Stand Alone (1998) which continues the story of the butcher and features a gruesome depiction of the butcher’s thoughts about killing himself and his daughter (again accompanied by a flashing warning title). However, it is only after the butcher is pushed to explore these thoughts of murder and suicide that he seems to undergo somewhat of a cathartic release, probing again at this view that perhaps death is just another catalyst for new life.

“Noé’s desired intention is to not bend the knee to cinema’s pleasantries by creating the craved comfort of a typical cinema experience, but to confront the viewer, and force us to grapple with questions which may not be the most consoling but are undoubtedly some of the most beneficial for our growth.”

Perhaps his most upsetting engagement with this theme is in the infamous Irréversible (2001). The dizzying film centres around two men who seek to avenge the brutal rape and attack of the woman they both love and plays out in reverse chronological order. So as a result, when the film ends with what should be a happy scene of Bellucci’s character finding out she is pregnant, we know from what we have seen, that a harrowing attack lies in-store for her, rendering her unconscious and her unborn infant dead. This is one depiction that definitely does not invoke the positive aspects of death which the director sometimes examines, but it does serve as a powerful anecdote regarding the delicate and fleeting nature of existence, and how easily it can all come spiralling down if we lose our control.

This exploration of destiny and existentialism trickles consistently throughout his later works too, as Noé toys with these themes through the protagonists of his films, by showing their struggles to walk the tightrope of their own destiny, falling victim to the cruel finger of fate. Noé wastes no time in handing out brutal punishment to them for their shortcomings; incarceration, death, mental anguish. It is clear that Noé has respect for those who can control their own world, but also realises that this decision is not always in our hands, stating his curiosity and fascination with “how people behave when they lose control”.

Almost as shocking as the stories which Noé tells, are his gutsy directorial motifs which bleed together effortlessly with the subject matter. The swooping camerawork of Enter the Void, the raw un-simulated sex scenes of Love, or the thumping visuals of Climax which don’t seem to give us a moment’s rest. We are ritually provided with sensory succour as we cut our way through the dense and dull worlds which he creates. For this reason, Noé's body of work is often categorised as part of the Cinema du Corps or “New French Extremity”. This denotes a body of films that take an extreme approach to the depiction of sex and violence, having been described as a “crossover between sexual decadence, bestial violence and troubling psychosis”.

Cinema du Corps’s literal translation is “body cinema”, which seems extremely fitting given Noé’s love of weaving in unconventional techniques to envelop viewers in his work and create emotional responses not just in the mind but in the body too. For example, employing Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk to create a harrowing droning soundtrack to accompany the on-screen horrors of Irréversible which are accompanied by a low 27 Hz frequency which police use to quell riots for the first 30 minutes of the film.

This, along with the gruesome murder with a fire- extinguisher and a 9-minute rape scene, helped gain the film the unorthodox claim-to-fame as one of the most notorious film walk-outs with an estimated twenty percent of the audience leaving during the Cannes screening, and twenty audience members having to be treated with oxygen due to fainting.

An attendee was quoted saying "the scenes in this film are unbearable, even for us professionals.". While this may irk some directors, Noé delighted in this. Spurred on by the media frenzy which he seems to spark, he has said that “if you surprise other people, you surprise yourself”, even expressed some disappointment at how commercially received his latest full-length film Climax (2018) was.

Director Paul Schrader was known to have said over a meeting where Noé proposed a movie full of pornography and violence to him that, “I don't think anyone's shockable anymore”. The French enfant terrible clearly does not shy away from a challenge, and it seems he took this invitation to shock and ran with it. And in my opinion he’s succeeding.