Gaspar Noé’s ‘Climax’: An Orgy Of Sex, Drugs, Horror & Death [Cannes Review]

If there’s one defining quality of the cinema of Gaspar Noé, aside from shots of ejaculating penises in 3D, it’s definitely impatience. His new film, “Climax” even begins impatiently, interrupting its Arte logo with a staticky video smash cut (the “record needle scratch” of Noé’s aesthetic) into its opening scene. This striking high overhead of a bleeding girl screaming and dragging herself through a pristine snowscape, will not be the last time “Climax” will deal so directly in slasher-movie imagery, a reference helped along by the clever use of Gary Numan‘s synthy-slick arrangement of Eric Satie‘s “Trois Gymnopedies.”

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But then this opening reveals itself as an epilogue, when just a few minutes in, the closing credits roll, as though Noé, having just started his movie, is already impatient for it to end — a feeling to which many of us who sat through his interminable “Love” can easily relate. This is a witty, tricksy, fuck-you way to kick off proceedings; the question is, can Noé possibly maintain this cinematic priapism for the subsequent 90 minutes? Or has he, how to put this delicately, already shot his wad?

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To the great relief of us Noé fence-sitters, thanks to a wildly talented cast of dancers and to Benôit Debie‘s similarly double-jointed, contortionist camerawork, “Climax” mostly maintains a bloodrush level of kinetic dynamism, that only flags in the final stretch, or if you’re inclined to look for a narrative or thematic skeleton underneath all this lithe skin. Though the photography is outstanding throughout, it’s true that sometimes, the visual brio almost becomes the film’s own worst enemy: the heavy use of overhead cameras means that endless shots of whirling mini skirts and whipping heads of hair start to take on an abstract, spinning-umbrella hypnotic quality, and you can quite easily float out of Noé’s sticky grasp.

But for the most part, the dance scenes are electrifying. He found his cast, aside from stellar lead Sofia Boutella, in dance troupes across France, and we’re introduced to them individually before we see them move in that astonishingly fluid choreography that Debie’s camera just worships.  Snippets of their taped audition interviews play out on a TV set around which are jumbled books and VHS tapes which provide a handy list of reference points: “Salo,” “Hara Kiri,” “Possession,” “Querelle” are among the movies, while the books include Pierre Petit‘s “Molinier, une vie d’enfer” and what looks to be a suicide manual. So it’s going to be a heaping serving of fetishism, sex, horror and death, then? ‘K, cool.

That is just a kind of provocation checklist, though: “Climax,” like arguably all of Noé’s films, suffers from vacuity — there’s so much flash and dazzle, but, despite the odd groaningly pretentious intertitle (“LIFE IS A COLLECTIVE IMPOSSIBILITY”; “DEATH IS AN EXTRAORDINARY EXPERIENCE” the latter projected upside down presumably to make it less banal) not a lot going on in its head. Or, indeed, its plot: The dancers first practice their routine through, and then party in a large deserted school hall— in a building full of dingy passageways that are lit through filters that must surely go by the industry name of “Noé Corridor Red” by now. Unbeknownst to them, one of their numbers has spiked the sangria with powerful LSD, and the flirting, dancing and partying, underneath a never-ceasing, terrifically well-chosen techno soundtrack, takes an inexorable turn for the hellish. Safe to say, Big Acid will not be happy with how “Climax” portrays the effects of their product.

We mostly follow the Boutella’s choreographer, Selva, appropriately named because the gorgeous French dancer and actress is basically an equatorial hot wet forest here — an entire ecosystem whose performance magnetizes what would otherwise be a flyaway narrative around herself. She’s never less than absolutely convincing, whether dancing, shouting out the semi-improvised dialogue over the DJ’s music or, amusingly and somehow also sexily, getting her hands trapped inside her own tights while tripping balls. A few of the other dancers get a little characterization too: There’s ladies’ man and “walking invitation to an STD” David (Romain Guillermic); there’s Gazelle (Giselle Palmer) whose brother Taylor (Taylor Kastle) is a little too protective of her; there’s Emmanuelle  (Claude Gajan Maull) who ill-advisedly brought her cute little boy Tito along with her; and there’s Psyche (Thea Carla Schøtt), the Berliner who came to France, ironically, to leave behind Berlin’s drug scene before she became “another Christiane F.”

It’s an exciting, diverse, attractive ensemble. And there are few buttons Noé won’t mash down on in an effort to keep up our interest, especially when the finale operates at such a consistent level of derangement that white noise effect threatens. Reckless child endangerment, potential infanticide, the kicking of a pregnant woman in the stomach, incest, a dancer with her head on fire, lots of orgiastic soft-focus boning (but no man-on-man; Noé remains timid as a vicar about male homosexuality) and multiple suicide attempts are all thrown at us, in a headachey final half-hour that sees the camera more often dancing on the ceiling than the floor.

The madness escalates in such a way that comparisons to the final third of Darren Aronofsky‘s “mother!” are inevitable, but that film had thematic ambitions to match its filmmaking chops, and the same cannot be claimed for Noé. This is exhaustingly exhibitionist cinema, that wants to be looked at for the sake of being looked at — for the crispness of its moves, not the complexity of its concepts, and that can get wearying after a while. So though it certainly marks a step up (and a “Step Up“) from his last provocation, (at least “Climax” is sodden with sweat and blood rather than “Love”‘s tears of self-pity) this bizarre meta-mashup of dance movie and Giallo horror is the definition of the mileage-may-vary movie: It’s Noé doing “The Red Shoes” on literal acid, and he will either dance you, or bore you, to death. [B]

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