Hear Me Out: ‘Vortex’ is Gaspar Noé’s underrated masterpiece
During the late 1990s and the early ’00s, New French Extremity became a prominent facet of French cinema, home to subversive and shocking movies. Gaspar Noé’s early work, like I Stand Alone and Irreversible, emerged during this period, pushing the boundaries with their brutal scenes of violence and explicit sexuality, exploring taboo themes like incest and rape.
With Irreversible, Noé cemented his reputation as one of cinema’s most controversial filmmakers. The ten-minute graphic rape scene angered many viewers, and the whole film’s disorientating nature (Noé used a sound frequency that induced feelings of nausea) caused strong reactions, including fainting and mass walkouts. Still, film fans couldn’t deny Noé’s innovative use of form, presenting events in reserve and using lucid, dizzying camera movements and music.
Since then, he’s continued to make controversial movies, from Love, featuring real sex and even a 3D ejaculation scene; Climax, using long, interrupted shots; Enter the Void, featuring POV shots; and Lux Æterna, where strobing lights and split-screens are used. Evidently, Noé is a huge proponent of using form as a means to tell a story, suggesting that the way we interact with the content of his work is massively important. He immerses us into his world by creating visceral viewing experiences – communicating confusion, despair or anxiety through formal techniques that evoke these feelings in the audience.
His 2021 film Vortex is so often overlooked in favour of his more violent or sexually provocative movies, yet its use of form, paired with an emotional and empathetic exploration of dementia and mortality, makes it his true masterpiece. Noé suffered a brain haemorrhage in 2020, which put him face to face with the idea of death. Inspired by his near-tragic experience, as well as his own mother’s dementia, Noé began writing Vortex. There are no crazy criminals in this one, unlike pretty much all of his other films, just an elderly couple, their adult son, and his young son.
In the leading roles are Dario Argento and Françoise Lebrun, who play an old married couple living in France. Both enjoyed established careers, and their apartment is covered in books for as far as the eye can see. Yet, we soon learn that LeBrun’s unnamed character (referred to as Elle) has been experiencing a decline in her health, her dementia getting increasingly worse. Argento’s character (referred to as Lui) has also been struggling with heart issues, although he desperately tries to distract himself from the fact that the pair’s situation is heading towards an inevitable end.
Split into two, we always see Argento on one half of the screen and Lebrun on the other, reflecting how their illnesses will tear them apart. They grow further away from each other as Lebrun frequently behaves strangely, wandering out of the flat without telling Argento, leaving him in a state of panic. Meanwhile, their son, Stephane, tries to look after them, persuading them to move into accommodation where carers can properly attend to their needs. Stephane has a young son to care for, but he’s also battling an addiction to drugs – the situation is a tragic one defined by inevitable human struggles, ones that we often try not to think about.
The split-screen technique works beautifully, with Noé exploring those final weeks before death and the worries and reckoning which float between the different parties involved. Argento’s character is particularly concerned with losing all of his belongings if he were to move into a care home. A lifetime of books and memories surround him at home – the last thing he wants to do is lose them all. Noé carefully constructs questions around such topics, emphasising how we become one with our possessions; we see them as extensions of ourselves, holding stories between their yellowed pages. To get rid of them prematurely would be to accept death’s inevitability, reaching closer and closer by the day.
At the end of the film, Noé places images of the empty apartment as it slowly gets emptied of its things. These are poignant scenes, evoking sadness and loss through the absence of physical items – cluttered evidence that someone’s existence has suddenly been taken away. From the inclusion of a young Françoise Hardy singing ‘Mon amie la rose’ at the start of the movie to the inclusion of the actors’ (and Noé’s) birthdates on the opening credits, this is a film meticulously and delicately crafted to make viewers reflect on their lives, relationships and mortality. Noé doesn’t rely on shock here, and while movies like Climax and Enter the Void are fantastic, the filmmaker reached a career-high with the sheer beauty displayed in Vortex.
