dosed and confused

Even without foreknowledge of neither Gaspar Noe’s crave to goad nor any info involving a horny dance troupe and a very portentous bowl of sangria, you know you’re headed towards a hellscape. The opening shot, directly overhead, features a blood-soaked woman wriggling in anguish, snow-angel style on a white snowy canvas as the end credits scroll up. I fell for it, pushing pause and seeing if I somehow started it at the wrong place. From here we watch interviews with the company, presumably audition videos peppered with tidbits of data regarding their personalities, information that doesn’t really add up to much though the ensuing perpetrator is hiding here in plain sight. This smorgasbord of humanity is then shown in beautiful solidarity performing a choreographed dance to Cerrone’s Supernature. For me to call this a highpoint in this scalawag’s brash career might seem like a snide commendation as said career has mostly annoyed the shit out me, but for once his talent isn’t eclipsed by his true vocation to eternally stick in bourgeois festival leech’s crawl. In this he has made a brand and stuck staunchly to it. I’ve said before that such an aptitude is rigged to avoid any true criticism; react and out yourself as a delicate sucker. Still, it’s nice to see him filming his actors with such adoration and grace even if it’ll all end as it typically does with everyone either dead or worse. These scenes are intercut with dialogue that implies certain characters are here to either fight or fuck, some of the implications suggest that the sex won’t be consensual and this seed is planted making much of what’s to come all the more alarming. Nobody in their right mind would suggest that dialogue is Noe’s knack and Climax is no exception. The aforementioned bowl of sangria has been spiked with LSD, and I’m guessing based on everyone’s eventual ruin it was a substantial amount. The effects don’t rear their ugly head until at least 45 minutes of relative niceties have passed (including another dance sequence shot directly above the performers). The preliminary shock leads to three of the dancers getting fucked up by their troupe; one burn victim, one frozen man, and one pregnant woman kicked in the stomach. This violence and the violence forthcoming seem to stem from Noe’s puerile notions of foul human nature coaxed out by the acid. This is where Climax started to lose me, but not completely. My problem with the descent into hell wasn’t that it was horrid and disturbing (the sound of a scared tripping 5 year old screaming for his mother, who locked him in a storage room and lost the key, was sufficient nightmare fuel for me), it’s that Noe can’t resist tethering contrived plot to what ought to be pure nonsensical anguish and chaos. The worst and most unforgivable also takes up the most time; a brother chasing down and attempting to rape his sister. This is the type of puerile baby baiting that distracts from the genuinely revolting and oddly beautiful funhouse of insanity strewn about the red soaked dancefloor. The callbacks only sidetrack us and break the spell. Noe is working with a dream synopsis, so simple that it doesn’t really require much. His need to spike this punch with reason is telling. Stop making sense.