Vortex

An idyllic scene: husband and wife, in their twilight years, sharing a glass of wine on a balcony overlooking the Parisian skyline. “Life is a dream,” she says. “Yes, a dream within a dream,” he replies, quoting Edgar Allan Poe. And then the idyll fractures: the couple are in bed when a vertical line emerges from the top of the screen and slowly extends between them, halving the widescreen image and confining each to their separate frame. That’s how we follow them for the rest of the film – in the yoke of the split screen, bound yet irreparably apart – as they navigate the purgatory of their labyrinthine apartment, stacked floor to ceiling with the books, artworks and photographs that testify to a life spent together and immersed in cultural pursuits.
Perennial enfant terrible Gaspar Noé reveals an unknown tender side here, charting his protagonists’ inexorable advance towards death with affecting empathy. The meta-casting of film legends Françoise Lebrun and Dario Argento gestures toward the tired trope of the death of cinema; at film’s close, the headstones might bear the actors’ real names and dates of birth, but we know they’re still alive and kicking. And, as VORTEX confirms, so is cinema. (Giovanni Marchini Camia)

In the presence of Gaspar Noé  on October 25.

Gaspar Noé: TINTARELLA DI LUNA (1985, K), PULPE ALMÈRE (1987, K), CARNE (1991, K), INTOXICATION (1998, K), SODOMITES (1998, K), MENSCHENFEIND (1998), IRREVERSIBEL (2002), DESTRICTED (2006, Episode), ENTER THE VOID (2009), 7 DÍAS EN LA HABANA (2012, Episode), LOVE (2015), CLIMAX (2016), LUX ÆTERNA (2019)