Dharma For One: Enter the Void by Gaspar Noé

Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void will likely split its audience into those who find it interminably boring and overwrought and those who are able to sit back and experience the journey. It's like a cross between 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Tibetan Book of the Dead and is the best bit of mindfuck cinema since David Lynch's Inland Empire.

Oscar is a twenty-something American living in Tokyo with his sister, Linda. In the opening, they are out on the balcony of their cramped apartment as a plane flies overhead. The scene and, indeed, most of the rest of the film, is shot from Oscar's point-of-view with the camera acting as his eyes. The screen even goes black briefly at time to simulate his eye lids closing and opening. Oscar asks Linda whether she'd like to see the city from way high above. She wouldn't. She'd be scared of dying. In addition to the POV camerawork, Oscar's voice is a bit muffled while that of his sister is clear which adds to the weird sense of being inside the character.

Linda heads to work and this affords Oscar some time to smoke some DMT, a powerful hallucinogen. He sits on a couch and we see a pair of hands jut into view with one holding a lighter and the other a pipe. Oscar closes his eyes and the viewer is sent on a long journey through a world of colorful betentacled shapes that undulate in a hallucinogenic ballet. This is a long, gentle sequence – too long, no doubt for many – but one that lulls the audience into trance and prepares it for the rest of the film.

A phone call and a buzz at the door see Oscar leave with his friend Alex and head to a bar called The Void where our protagonist is meeting his buddy Victor to sell him some drugs. Alex has lent Oscar the Tibetan Book of the Dead and a lengthy descent down the stairs includes a conversation about the book. Out on street Alex warns Oscar, despite his protestations, that he has morphed into a drug dealer and that he ought to be careful. At The Void, Oscar sits down across from Victor and pulls out a bag of drugs which prompts the police to spring into action. Oscar runs into the bathroom and locks the door. He frantically tries to flush the drugs down the toilet. In his panic he warns the police that he's got a gun which prompts them to shoot him through the door. We hear mumbling incredulously as his body slumps to the floor.

This is when the real trip begins. Oscar's soul leaves his bodies and floats upwards. We see his corporeal remains curled around the toilet. It then wanders the city peeking in on his sister and friends with the camera looking straight down from above. Alex flees the scene once he discovers that Oscar has been shot. He calls Linda and leaves a voice mail telling her of the tragedy. Linda doesn't answer the phone because she is having sex with the owner of the club at which she works. But, once the coitus is over she hears the message and breaks down crying.

It helps in understanding the film to read a bit about the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I looked it up at Wikipedia and it mentions the bardo or interval between death and being reincarnated. Enter the Void divides the bardo into three sections. First is the above wandering in the aftermath of death. This is followed by a lengthy series of flashbacks in which we learn that Oscar and Linda were orphaned at a young age when the car they were in with their parents rammed a truck in a head-on collision. The children made a pact to be together forever but were ripped apart when they were each put in separate foster homes. In addition to childhood memories, we also discover that Oscar arrived in Tokyo first and paid for Linda to come over. Past adventures with Alex and Victor are also explored as is an affair he had with Victor's mother.

This sequence is trippy in its own way. Instead of seeing everything from Oscar's POV we see events from over his shoulder. The back of his head is omnipresent in these scenes whether it is him as an adult or as a child. It is a bit disconcerting to see everything play out with the outline of his shoulders and head always front and center of the frame but it's also oddly comforting as well and it grounds the whole sequence stylistically.

The third bardo find Oscar's soul wandering again and we see more of the aftermath of his death. In one of the flashbacks we learn that Victor has a friend who has built a large scale model of a section of Tokyo. Fluorescent colors are all aglow under blacklight and the guy eagerly shows the crazy pattern of the wall of the Love Hotel. In the third bardo Linda and Alex make their way to a life-sized Love Hotel. Oscar's soul flies in and out of the rooms watching various couples having sex as their genitals pulse with bright light and emanates outwards in tentacles of procreative energy. This scene confused me until I read at Wikipedia that this period of the bardo "features karmically impelled hallucinations which eventually result in rebirth. (Typically imagery of men and women passionately entwined.)" Oscar eventually makes his way into a sperm…

I found myself sucked into the world of Enter the Void. It is absolutely hypnotic. The camera is almost always moving within long takes in graceful floating maneuvers. Bright colors assault the senses at nearly every turn. Using a solitary point-of-view keeps you focused on the scene instead of having your mind wander off into other areas of the story world. The film has a poetic and meditative quality to it that reminds of Andrei Tarkovsky. It's just that much of the meditation is done in cramped apartments, a strip club, and on the refulgent streets of Tokyo. Oscar's soul floats and observes until the camera descends into a hole or a light and emerges somewhere else. The screen goes black or to white and stays there for a while a number of times. There are Conversations about the Tibetan Book of the Dead don't serve as an exegesis but are instead signposts in the story. And the soundtrack is great as well. There are all the digetic sounds but I really appreciated the ambient sounds of the afterlife. As his soul wanders and acts the voyeur, there are stretches when there is just this hum on the soundtrack which works perfectly. People may be talking and cars honking in this realm but out in the void, there's just a little white noise.

Thematically the film is a very byzantine way of saying tempus fugit and lamenting the fragile nature of love, relationships, and existence. Oscar and/or his soul flashes back to the car accident which robbed him and Linda of their parents multiple times. So too with the scene of social workers tearing the children away from one another. Everything we love and cherish – our kith & kin and our lives – can be gone in a fleeting instant.

On the other hand, the film may be about these themes but in a less romantic way. Perhaps it is saying something about the absurdity of it all. Our lives and the people in them can be gone in a wink so why do we bother with such feelings and expend the energy to maintain them? The more I think about the film, the more uncertain I am about it. There is a good deal of nudity and sexuality here. Oscar and Linda's relationship is oddly tinted with the possibility of incestuous feelings. Their mother is shown several times breastfeeding, we see them as children together in the bath, and Linda nibbles at his neck and ear in one scene after they've been reunited in Tokyo. Shortly after dying, Oscar's soul enters Linda's vagina and watches a glans come and go. in the distance. Hell, maybe Oscar never died and his consciousness never roamed. Maybe the whole thing was just an oneiric flight of fancy.