In 2012, after months in Buenos Aires helping care for his Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother, Gaspar Noé traveled to Cannes and saw Michael Haneke’s Amour, about a husband dealing with his wife’s stroke. “Oh my god, I cried watching that movie,” he says. “Even if that movie had nothing to do with my personal life, it was about someone who needs to die, and at that time we were considering how my mother could die peacefully.” After the festival, Noé returned to Argentina; his mother died a few weeks later. When the Palme d’Or–winning, and quite brutal, Amour went on to international […]

As I’m editing my print-edition interview with Gaspar Noe about his new feature, Vortex (to my mind, at this moment, his best film), this new trailer from Utopia is a nice refresher. From the Francoise Hardy soundtrack to the Edgar Allen Poe-quoting tagline to the consoling gesture rendered uncanny by Noe’s split screen, this trailer captures the film’s melancholy heartbreak and unsentimental philosophy. The film is an astringent yet not uncompassionate look at the final days of two aging leftists, a married couple played by director Dario Argento (portraying a film critic, which Argento once was) and actress Francoise Lebrun […]

I typically aim to use this last post as my awards clean-up, wherein I tackle the prize-winning films I didn’t address in my previous dispatches. This year will have to be different, since Spike Lee’s jury trophied many of the films I already found generative enough to have given them space here. Not atypically, though, the panel failed to hand any accolades to the two films that in my opinion were the most laudable among the competition slate—namely, Bruno Dumont’s rapturously off-kilter France, which could have justifiably taken any prize on the menu except Best Actor (although Macron’s unknowing cameo […]

We’re still waiting here in the States to see Gaspar Noe’s previous collaboration with Saint Laurent, Lux Æterna, which premiered in Cannes in 2019, but the fashion house has just dropped a new short by the French director that’s well worth a late-night watch. Starring Charlotte Rampling and a group of models — Anok Yai, Antonia Przedpelski, Assa Baradji, Aylah Mae Peterson, Clara Deshayes, Grace Hartzel, Kim Schell, Mica Arganaraz, Miriam Sanchez, Sora Choi, and Stefania Cristian — the film begins a model’s frenzied run through crimson-lit woods at night (a not to Suspiria, perhaps, as well as Last House on […]

Gaspar Noé may never mature in the ways his detractors wish (rather, many of them long for the day that he disappears completely), and yet his work, especially from his erotic 3D film, Love (2015), to the present, continues to surprise me. Creator of his own distinct cinematic idiom—one almost always described as both formally and thematically extreme—Noé returns to Cannes only a year after his Directors’ Fortnight success story, Climax, with a medium-length, stroboscopic, essayistic polyptych titled Lux Æterna. Even as Lux opens with a gently flickering title card that quotes Fyodor Dostoevsky on epilepsy—a state he said offers […]

A Travis Bickle wannabe is shitkicked at a neon-streaked Parisian club — it’s the new video from Gaspar Noe, which brings a near-Irreversible level of violence and the director’s trademark twisting overhead camera to a club track by the French producer. Check it out above.

“Birth is a unique opportunity. Death is an extraordinary experience. Life is a collective impossibility.” –CLIMAX (2018) The film A dance company celebrating the end of their rehearsal on a snowy night in 1996 lose themselves to bacchanalian depravity in Climax, divided into two parts, each shot in long, continuous takes. The latest from Gaspar Noé, the director of Enter the Void and Love, returns to themes of his greatest dreams turned into nightmares through the hypnotic expressions of dance — and some surreptitiously drugged sangria. Who I spoke with    Gaspar Noé: Director, Writer, Co-Editor, Co-Producer Serge Catoire: Line […]

In a genuinely shocking turn of events, self-promoting shit-stirrer Gaspar Noé’s new film Climax — re-screened for festival-goers yesterday after it won the Directors’ Fortnight’s Art Cinema Award — is one of the best and most broadly-loved films to premiere in Cannes this year, pleasing devoted followers while winning over a fair many skeptics in the process. I’ll confess to being reasonably on board with his let’s-not-call-it-a-“project” coming into this one — especially when he works in 3D, as he did in his throwback to ’70s erotica, Love (2015) — though my enthusiasm for his movies has been invariably mitigated by […]

A threesome in 3-D and unsimulated sex in a simulated cinematic hyper-reality: that’s what Gaspar Noé’s latest film Love has been promising for months. At Cannes in 2014, producer Vincent Maraval teased audiences with explicit promo materials, pledging plenty of penis, nipple and onscreen ejaculate. While the film has all three in abundance, it turns out Love is more about loss than sex. The surprisingly sentimental tale begins with Murphy (Karl Glusman) receiving a desperate voicemail message from an ex’s mother. Murphy’s an American in Paris with a French girlfriend, crying baby and New Year’s Day hangover — a trifecta about […]

On Wednesday, October 28, Filmmaker Magazine will be presenting at the IFP’s Made in New York Media Center a Master Class on filmmaking with the provocative Paris-based, Argentinian auteur Gaspar Noé. As his latest film, Love, a romantic melodrama with hardcore sex and shot in 3D, prepares to hit American screens, we’ll be screening Noé‘s first, rarely-screened picture, Carne, and then discussing his subsequent work. With its widescreen cinematography, William Castle-ish flourishes and spasms of ultra-violence, Carne, a tale of a racist horse-meat butcher in the South of France bent on avenging what he believes to be the rape of […]