Enter the void

It isn't necessary to know about a movie director's spouse in order to appreciate the movie. Sometimes, though, especially with long films that outstay their welcome, such knowledge helps a viewer fill dire patches with musings that may be more amusing. Thus I'm idly curious how the Argentine-born Frenchman Gaspar Noe meet his kindred spirit and wife, Lucile Hadzihalilovic (from Bosnian immigrant parents), a film school graduate two years older than him.

Which parts of their first English-language movie, Enter the Void (2009) did she, as Noe's credited co-writer, draft? Did he collaborate on her 1996 writing-directing debut feature about child abuse, La bouche de Jean-Pierre? They go back a long way. She produced, co-edited and acted in his breakthrough 1991 short film, Carne, in which a butcher kills a man he wrongly accuses of raping his daughter.

They worked together on a set of sex-education short films in 1998 (hers was called Good boys use condoms, his was Sodomites). In the same year, she edited his feature-length follow-up on the vengeful butcher, Seul contre tous (I Stand Alone). Six years later, she was on her own, perhaps, directing her adaptation of a Wedekind story set in a disturbing girls' school (Innocence). By then, he'd already gained international fame and funds from his infamously violent take on misogyny, rape, homophobia and brutal vengeance, Irreversible (2002). They could now afford to develop a favourite project inspired by drug-tripping hallucinations.

A young North American drug dealer, initially a first-person character seen only in a mirror, is shot dead by Tokyo police during a drugs raid. His spirit wanders above the city to watch over the adored younger sister who'd joined him in Japan, working as a pole-dancer. For various reasons (its photogenic neon lights and harsh anti-drug laws), Tokyo was Noe's ideal location.

As in Irreversible, Noe takes us out at night a lot, into dark valleys and strobe-lit discos, neon-dazzled streets and interiors, scruffy corridors and lurid bedrooms. Couples have rough or indifferent sex, male and female genitalia are exhibited non-erotically, and unpleasant gay characters lounge around. In swathes of non-linear flashbacks, when Noe's hovering hand-held camera returns from cranes and helicopters to ground level, we follow the baby-faced young man's interactions with his sister, a wiser friend, and a young Caucasian client and his randy mother. The last two characters are played by professional actors (from the UK), as is the sister; other lead characters are first-timers with varying levels of screen talent.

Noe also flashes back frequently to show the infant siblings getting a lot of nude bathing experience with their voluptuous mother, who dies in a car crash with their father while the kids are traumatised in the back seat. Throughout, there are trippy CGI scenes recalling old kaleidoscopes, pinhole cameras recording blood vessels, and apparent tributes to Kubrik's spaced-out visions in 2001.

When that movie first appeared, trendy folks used to book front-row stalls seats, smoke grass and Wow! at magic scenes. Grass might help one better to get into the spirit of Noe's void, where the deliberately hazy blurriness of the camera film he chose to use probably looks better too. Even the front-credits are perversely offbeat, presented strobe-style at high speed together with mind-banging electronic musical noise. Other affectations thrust in an audience's face include brief cuts to black to simulate the young man's eyes blinking, florid CGI enhancement of cityscapes and sets, and a pair of much longer cuts to black during the final sequence illustrating the conception and birth of a baby.

That truly climactic ending's two black pauses are akin to cinematic coitus interruptus. They follow an exhausting set of overhead shots of couples copulating and licking noisily, some kinkily, in a love hotel's blurry bedrooms. The tip of a penis is shown (via a pinhole camera or CGI) preparing to ejaculate, as seen from within a woman's body, which may be that of the drug-addled sister, whose finally child emerges in a big blur, to have its umbilical cord cut and scream at its entry into the signposted void. Noe may have hoped it was his final tease, which is why there are no end-credits, which were flashily zipped through at the beginning. Our audiences will leave exhausted, debating who the father is, the obsessed Noes may have thought.

Painful, pretentious, occasionally pretty, most appropriately watched on DVD with a Fast Forward button, Enter the Void is unforgettable and only slightly forgivable cinema.