Like Lars von Trier or Todd Solondz, enfant terrible Gaspar Noé’s new films don’t seem to be as inspired lately. But with cinematography by Benoît Debie, some music by Thomas Bangalter, and a desperate for attention credit sequence, Noé remains faithful to his violent, drug-infused aesthetic of Eurotrash scumbags and romantics inhabiting discotheques and fucking while he dabbles in existentialism.
When first hearing about Climax (2018, Noé) I was a little worried that it would be boring or feel limited in a low budget way because it was going to be about a group of dancers in one room. Those worries were dispelled.
The big problem I had with Climax was that I didn’t buy into the behavior that the people resorted to after the LSD kicked in. In general films have often showed a character on say, marijuana, having wild hallucinations that are excessive and unrealistic, which has bugged me on many occasions. But Climax has a momentum to it, engaging characters, and camera moves that make the POV feel like it’s from an non-diegetic carnival ride—steadicam that frames canted angles, low angles, overhead angles and sometimes positions so ambiguous the action becomes abstract. There’s also an editing pattern that shifts from choppy jump-cuts with dropped frames then on to single takes that last over twenty minutes.
Although by the end I processed the narrative as an existential dissection of real terror inherent within the ensemble unleashed by the drugs. Climax is scarier than Us (2019, Jordan Peele) and not to sound too cheesy but you know, like, the climax of the film is the climax of the high is the climax of these characters’ lives is the climax of life.
And like all of Noé’s films, Climax made me feel emotionally nauseous in a colorful, sexy, dangerous way.
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