Vortex (2022)
dir. Gaspar Noé
Rated: N/A
image: ©2022 Utopia
It took Gaspar Noé almost dying to transform his usually grim and nihilistic take on life into something wholly new with Vortex, the director’s seventh feature film. Well, maybe not wholly new. His latest is still grim and nihilistic, but there is an empathy present that boarders on humanistic. That’s a quality that might seem antithetical to describing Noé’s work, but what appears in only trace amounts – and only if you’re really engaging with his films – in previous of the director’s titles like Enter the Void and Climax takes an uneasy spotlight in Vortex, even as it works alongside Noé’s more signature preoccupations like dread and terror.
In early 2020, the Paris-based Argentine filmmaker, who is 58 years old, suffered a near fatal brain hemorrhage which ultimately helped inspire the story for Vortex. The opening line of text for the film, “To all those whose brains will decompose before their hearts,” leaves no doubt as to what’s on Noé’s mind with this picture.
Set in a residential neighborhood in northeast Paris, Vortex focuses on elderly couple Lui and Elle. Lui is a writer and possibly – the film never makes it clear – a filmmaker who is working on a new book about the dream-like quality of movies. The couple, who are in either their late 70s or early 80s, begin to struggle when some form of dementia begins to take hold of Elle. As she increasingly loses her grasp on reality, Lui turns to their adult son, Stéphane, for help, but he is wrestling with his own demons, leaving Lui to feel adrift in trying to hold his life with Elle together.
Vortex is a horror movie with zero scares. The terror comes when the quotidian slams into the uncertainty and agony of old age and old bodies that no longer function properly. An early sequence in the movie, which comes after a brief introductory passage showing us Lui and Elle’s life immediately before things start to fall apart, exquisitely sets our expectations for what’s about to come.
Upon waking and performing the mundane activities that accompany the start of the day – trips to the bathroom, the kitchen, etc. – Elle leaves the house as Lui bangs away on his (very old) typewriter. We think Elle is making a trip to a nearby market, but something is off with her behavior. We see her walk into and out of a few different stores with a blank, uncomprehending expression on her face. She wanders, seemingly aimlessly, from place to place with no recognition on her face of what she’s doing or why.
After a short time, Lui realizes that Elle hasn’t returned. He becomes worried and attempts to trace her steps around the neighborhood in order to find her. He does so, and we see a heartbreaking fact about the insidious condition to which we’re witnessing Elle succumb. Nothing happens all at once. There is no definitive event that signals the onset of dementia, like a light switch being flipped on or off; instead, it’s a slow drip, drip, drip of a steadily worsening condition. Lui is able to convince himself that his wife had a momentary mental fog that lifted as quickly as it descended.
Things take a turn for the worse soon after when Elle tells Stéphane, who is visiting so that his parents can see their young grandson, Kiki, that she’s frightened by the strange man – Lui – who keeps following her around. She begs her son to take her home, not realizing that’s where she already is or that Lui is her husband.
There might be zero scares in this psychological drama, but Noé’s creative aesthetic fills the frame with an uneasy dread as we watch the lives of his characters begin to unravel. In the brief introduction to the characters, we see Lui and Elle sharing the claustrophobic, but warm, 4:3 frame. Most of the warmth of these beginning few minutes comes from a sense of the old couple sharing a life. As they sit on their charming patio together, Elle asks her husband, “Life’s a dream, isn’t it?” “Yes,” he replies, “A dream within a dream.”
The movie then cuts to the couple in bed on the morning that Elle leaves without knowing where she’s going. As she stirs from sleep, Lui snoring and frequently coughing beside her, a black line slowly – almost imperceptibly, because of the muted early-morning light – cuts the frame in half, with Lui on one side and Elle on the other. The rest of the film is shot in this way, with two cameras relentlessly following behind one or the other of the couple, both views playing out side by side.
It reminded me of 2000’s Timecode, an experimental film from Mike Figgis in which the director used the then-emerging digital camera technology to film four different storylines in real time, played simultaneously in a grid on the screen. Similarly, Vortex contains mostly long, unbroken takes. The sound mix of Timecode was designed so that it featured the audio from whichever video feed was most important for the story in that moment.
Noé uses the technique to visually highlight the increasing mental separation of Lui and Elle. They do share the same frame together at various points throughout the movie – whenever they stand next to each other, we see them together in both of the overlapping camera angles – but Noé makes clear through the different camera perspectives that the failing health of this couple has, in fact, uncoupled them. In addition to Elle’s mental decline, Lui’s body is beginning to fail him.
The couple in Vortex have a son, but in addition to raising his own child, Stéphane has a crack cocaine habit that limits his ability to help his aging and ailing parents, though he tries. The character that Noé crafts is nuanced and complex. Stéphane might be a drug user, but he also appears to be a caring father to his son and he genuinely seems to be concerned about his parents’ well-being. It’s a surprisingly well-rounded and empathetic look at drug addiction from a director who delighted – as only an enfant terrible of cinema could – in exploring the twisted and gruesome effects of LSD on an unsuspecting dance troupe, as he did in Climax.
Regular readers know that my wife and I don’t have kids and that we don’t have plans to ever have any. We’re in our early 40s now, and we’ve both felt, in mostly minor ways so far, our bodies beginning the slow and inexorable work of breaking down. It was sobering to watch this old couple who essentially have no one to turn to for help. Rae and I have had the discussion before; we’ll be among those who don’t have a younger generation of family to step in when we’re unable to care for ourselves. (Not that having a kid guarantees that they’ll take an interest when this stage of life inevitably arrives.)
The possibilities of exploring this scenario through a horror lens are likely innumerable, but I’m forced to wonder if my familiarity with Noé’s filmography increased my own sense of dread as the film unspooled before my eyes. I’ve never seen it, but Noé’s brutal and terrifying break-out Irréversible is infamous for its disturbing psychological undertones and graphic violence, including sexual violence.
Enter the Void and Climax are movies I respect – I hold the former in particularly high regard – but both are practically gleeful in their depiction of violence. Knowing all this means, I think, that I was on high alert throughout the whole of Vortex in a way that someone unfamiliar with Noé’s work might not have been. With this movie, the terror is in the everyday knowledge that some day our bodies will betray us. The lucky ones among us are the ones who go fast as opposed to the endless indignities of a failing mind or body.
It's true that Noé isn’t breaking any new ground as far as subject matter. Dementia, and its related conditions, have been explored in myriad movies. The Father and Still Alice are two recent, and very moving, examples. It’s Noé’s sui generis aesthetic that sets Vortex apart. No one else besides Gaspar Noé could make a movie like this. The simplest technique of the bifurcated view on the screen being only degrees off from one another, in the instances when both sets of action are taking place only a few feet apart, make for a spellbinding experience.
It was also an inspired choice on Noé’s part to cast legendary Italian horror and giallo director Dario Argento as Lui. This casting decision adds another layer of expectation to knowing audience members. The male lead of the film is responsible for 70s Italian horror-filled works like the cult classic Suspiria, Deep Red, and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, among many others. It wouldn’t be a stretch to assume that Argento and Noé teaming up might make for some truly horrific sights and sounds.
Argento displays a certain tired sorrow as Lui that makes us feel the pain and fear that comes with old age. In his first leading role, the 81-year-old Italian Argento learned to speak fluent, but heavily accented, French. This quirk of the performance leads to Argento speaking slowly and even pausing to search for the right word at times. It’s unrelated to our perception of Lui as struggling with his own failing body, but this aspect of Argento’s performance brings a melancholy touch to the character.
Alongside Argento is 77-year-old Françoise Lebrun doing fantastic, heartbreaking work as Elle. The French actress, best known for her work in 1973’s The Mother and the Whore, gives an eerily authentic interpretation of someone suffering from dementia. Lebrun gives a distinct difference to Elle in the brief moments of clarity the character enjoys versus when she has descended into confusion and helplessness. The actor makes the two versions of her character like night and day. Those moments of clarity for Elle act as brief bits of reprieve for the audience, but one doesn’t get too comfortable, knowing that it’s only a matter of time before the character is once again trapped within her own mind.
Alex Lutz gives a touching performance as Stéphane, a person struggling with addiction as he tries to raise his son and take care of his ailing parents. Lutz makes us believe that Stéphane cares deeply for his parents, like when he tries to convince Lui to give up their home to move into an assisted living facility. Stéphane listens compassionately as Lui describes old age as “a life among drugs.”
Gaspar Noé has captured a verisimilitude of the terrors and sorrow that come with dementia. It’s a long slog – the film clocks in at 142 minutes – and that’s partly the point. Living with dementia or caring for someone suffering from it must be a seemingly endless torture. It’s even harder if the person responsible for that care is also succumbing to other effects of old age. The end of life can be a brutal, merciless process, but underneath Noé’s exploration of that pain is knowing that this couple also shared decades and decades of happier times together.
Why it got 4.5 stars:
- I’m a sucker for avant-garde filmmaking almost every time. Noé’s unconventional techniques pay off in Vortex splendidly. He walks a fine line between an impossibly low-key horror vibe and crushing sadness.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- As with most of his other films (at least the few that I’ve seen), Noé starts his movie with the end credits. They come as a giant block of text that overwhelms the screen.
- As is the case with Enter the Void, the director uses an approximation of blinking with his cameras. I’m not sure it totally works here, because the POV of the cameras aren’t supposed to be the POV of actual characters, as with Enter the Void. It’s still a compelling way to shoot a movie. The blinks are mostly used here to hide cuts and make every scene seem like one long, unbroken take.
- I wouldn’t call myself a complete neat-freak, but I do not enjoy clutter. There’s something charming, though, about this couple’s home. It’s a hobbit-hole like dwelling with pop-culture artifacts stacked in every corner. I was particularly taken with the movie posters that Lui has in his office. Among them are posters for Metropolis and Peeping Tom. I got one little giggle from the two or three stacks of books on one half of the loveseat where Lui sits to watch a movie (I couldn’t place what movie it was, if anyone out there knows, clue me in!). Their home and possessions represent the detritus of a life together.
- This movie is the emotional antithesis of something like Dick Johnson is Dead.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
I saw this at a weeknight screening at the Texas Theatre. A good-sized crowd (for such a challenging movie) turned out for it, probably a couple dozen. The auditorium was deathly quiet as we all made our way out into the night.