Gaspar Noé/Trois Couleurs
Love, Climax, Lux Aeterna and now Vortex : since 2015 you have been going through a very productive period. How do you explain this?
"The main issue is that Enter the Void (his film preceding Love , released in 2009) was very difficult to finance, extremely long to prepare, shoot, and post-produce. But I've always wanted to make quick, local films, close to home, in Paris. We shot Love in five weeks, Irreversible (released in 2002) in five and a half weeks. Beyond that, I burn out. Climax was shot in fifteen days, Lux Aeterna in five days, and Vortex in 25 days. I'm not as prolific as Fassbinder, unfortunately, or as all the great masters of Japanese cinema who could make two, three, four films a year, but if I manage to make one film a year, I'll be happy." GN
The cast of Vortex is a pure cinephile's fantasy. Are Françoise Lebrun and Dario Argento two idols for you? They're each at opposite ends of the cinephile spectrum.
"They didn't even know each other existed! They met on set. I've always been fascinated by both of them. When I wondered which actress could play this character of a former psychiatrist who's losing her mind, the very first person who came to mind was Françoise Lebrun. Because I'm obsessed with one of her films…
As for Dario Argento , I'm as fascinated by his films as I am by him personally. I remember once at the Cinémathèque Française, he presented The Phantom of the Opera and for an hour he performed a monologue; the audience was in stitches, applauding. What a performance, what charisma! I met him in Toronto where I was presenting my film Carne (in 1991), and we've remained friends ever since. He even came to the editing room when I was working on Irreversible . After that, I spent a lot of time with his daughter (the actress and director Asia Argento) and saw him often. But I wasn't at all sure he would agree to act in the film, especially since I knew he was starting to prepare a new feature film as a director. Just when we were ready to shoot Vortex , his filming was delayed. I called his daughter, and she helped me convince him." GN
Did Dario Argento improvise in the film?
"He improvises, everyone improvises. There were a few rare lines of dialogue in the original micro-script, but those lines were meant to give people an idea of what the film was about and were definitely not meant to be followed. Dario, being a director, knows how to direct actors, but he knows even better how to direct himself, so he took charge of his own acting direction. Alex Lutz also took charge of his own acting direction because he's a great performer.
He had shot his film Guy , through which I discovered him, from a ten-page script; he likes it when things are created on location. As for Françoise, having myself seen many people up close who had difficulty expressing themselves due to age-related problems , my main instruction was to stammer. After that, like the other two, she was in complete control of her character; it was almost a co-authorship of the writing.
When she started crying because her grandson was banging his toy cars on the table, I hadn't asked her to do anything at all. The little boy banged so hard that after a while it created tension, and Françoise burst into tears. When I saw that, I cried myself behind the camera. It was so touching. It's good when a film manages to get a little closer to what filming a documentary is like. Everything is artificial, but at least by not imposing the dialogue, I can perhaps achieve a certain degree of naturalism. I showed the film to Barbet Schroeder, and he told me, "I can't stand improvisation on screen, but here, I really felt like I was seeing real life." From then on, my job was to hold one of the two cameras. The other camera was operated by Benoît Debie, my director of photography." GN
It's a characteristic of your films: the form is outlandish, conceptual, but the content is very close to reality. Here, we're almost in real time for the entire first part of the film.
"Yes, but it's still very edited. Sometimes I try to make films in long takes, but well, we always know that a long take, whether from the point of view of a fly or a man, is artificial. I don't know what camera position would be closest to a human eye, in reality. But for this film, which is the story of two shared solitudes, I thought: let's try it in split screen and always be on one side of the screen with the father and on the other side with the mother.
The result, which is very conceptual, works because the concept enters the brain in a very direct way. I don't feel the concept is burdensome; I feel it flows naturally. That subconsciously we understand exactly what it represents: two intertwined solitudes that form and dissolve. A film, in any case, is just a game with an artificial language called cinema; we are very, very far from real life.
But when we manage to get close to it because the situations seem believable and the format allows us to see these situations from a perspective we hadn't considered before, we can create a hypnotic state in the viewer. The film is quite hypnotic also because of the split screen; you don't know whether to look left or right. People who have seen the film several times have told me they felt like they were watching several different films. Your gaze sweeps from right to left, or remains fixed on one side, but you can't take in the whole film in one sitting." GN
There are also moments when the two cameras film almost the same thing, almost on the same axis, which creates a strangeness, a distortion.
"I was told the film was very psychedelic. That wasn't the intention. It's like when you see someone and then you see an X-ray of that person: it's the same person, but from a different perspective. We're not used to seeing the world that way. As soon as you separate the two perspectives, there are oddities that aren't natural but are playful.
I started experimenting with split screen on Lux Aeterna, then in an eight-minute commercial I directed for Yves Saint Laurent, and I sometimes saw things that worked that I hadn't even imagined. For Vortex, I hadn't planned to shoot the entire film in split screen. We started by shooting sometimes with one camera, sometimes with two. But when I began editing, I realized it was working really well, and we reshot some scenes to make sure I could have the entire film in split screen. I'm very happy I made that decision." GN
As is often the case in your films, you begin by telling us that it's going to end badly, which also creates a strong hold on the viewer. Here it's this dedication: "To all those whose brain will decompose before their heart."
"The dedication is meant to be taken literally. I think that a good third of the film's viewers will experience cognitive problems related to Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, or other similar diseases before they die. Within a family, you never know who will get cancer, who will spend ten years completely losing control of reality… it's like playing Russian roulette. It's very, very unexpected, and frankly, it's an absolute nightmare.
Even nightmares involving chemicals, like in Climax, are often less disturbing than problems related to brain degeneration. There have been plenty of films lately that have addressed these topics, like The Father or Amour, but perhaps they were more scripted, more conventional. In my film, because it's split screen and the way people speak has a documentary feel, we're directly affected. However, there's one film about old age that really inspired me: a 1958 film by Keisuke Kinoshita called The Ballad of Narayama . Like Kinoshita's other films, it's incredibly conceptual and deeply moving. He's a master of melodrama and of portraying the cruelty of the human experience." GN
Why this film about old age now? Does it scare you?
"No, it's fine! But we are indeed much more affected by this kind of subject at 50 because we've known a father, a mother, a stepfather, an aunt, or many other people who have found themselves in this situation. I saw my maternal grandmother lose her mind when I was a child. When I saw my mother in the same situation 30 years later, it was a whole different ball game… The situations that arise in those moments are… truly disturbing.
There was a time when I wondered what I could have filmed with Philippe Nahon (the actor who notably starred in Carne and Irreversible passed away in April 2020) . He had suffered two strokes, partially lost his speech, and I really wanted to make a film with him, in which he would have been free to act as he could, to use or invent whatever words he could… But ultimately it didn't happen, and perhaps not being able to make this improvised or semi-improvised film with him pushed me to make a similar film with Françoise Lebrun, even though she, of course, has no such issues. But these are very sad and very difficult situations." GN
There's a profound melancholy in the film, conveyed particularly through the posters and the books piled up in the couple's apartment. The ending features a heartbreaking series of static shots of the emptying rooms.
"Anyone who's lost their parents has experienced this; it's a classic story. Then you don't know what to do with the books, so you put them in storage and after six months you get rid of them… Objects are linked to people, and when the people are gone, they lose their real value. This apartment, belonging to a left-wing, 1968-era psychiatrist and a film critic obsessed with Fritz Lang, Federico Fellini, and Luis Buñuel, I wanted to be very messy.I had in mind the apartment of a friend, the film critic Jean-Claude Romer, who died this year; it's the most book-filled apartment I've ever seen. We discovered a building that was for sale and had already been used for a film shoot, and on one floor there was this apartment with very low ceilings and a labyrinthine layout. I thought it was good because it felt very gut-like. For this story of two people whose lives are coming to an end, the idea of having such a low ceiling immediately appealed to me; it reminded me of the low ceiling in one of the sets for Orson Welles's The Trial ." GN
Discreetly, through the character of Alex Lutz, who is a former junkie, the film also evokes the situation of the drug addicts of Stalingrad, which the media have been talking about a lot lately.
"What I liked about the idea of filming this relationship with drugs, even though it's secondary in the film, is that sometimes drugs or alcohol can destroy people physically and intellectually in a very serious way. Having burned through their energy chemically, some people age faster. Most drug users, whether on crack or heroin, are incredibly moving…
The character played by Alex Lutz is very likeable; he tries his best to help people have a more peaceful life, just like his mother, who was a psychiatrist, tried to help people. Neighborhoods suddenly overrun by drug trafficking have happened in Brazil, the United States, and now in Paris. It got much worse during this year of lockdown because at one point, the streets were deserted, and you saw all the people who were going through withdrawal, looking for their drugs. The trade grew, drug use grew, and perhaps the lockdown also fueled a growing interest in these kinds of practices. When I asked myself which neighborhood in Paris I wanted to film, I chose this one because it's the one that most reminds me of this past year of lockdown." GN
There is also a little boy in the film, the couple's grandson. What does he represent?
"I really wanted to have a very young child in the film, one who doesn't yet have a grasp of language, just as his grandmother is losing hers. In a way, they're almost on the same level, dialectically speaking. But he's so sweet that you also think there's a future that could be happy; he brings a ray of light to a situation of the end of an era, the end of life. GN
Finally, can we return to Françoise Le Brun? You said that one film in particular obsessed you.
"I've seen "The Mother and the Whore" 10, 12 times in my life, and it still remains for me the most impressive French film of the 1970s…" GN
Her role in your film, almost silent, is the opposite of the one she played in Eustache's film, which was very talkative and cerebral.
"Yes, the character is the opposite, and my approach is the opposite of Eustache's working method, which was to adhere strictly to the dialogue he had written, inspired by real life. For me, it's the opposite. But I believe that when you make a film, you have to surround yourself in front of and behind the camera with the most intelligent, most inspired people you can find, and I was incredibly lucky to have such a talented trio. They are all so moving… It's strange that the film isn't in Competition at Cannes, but I think if it had been, there might have been an acting award. They are so good." GN
About Juliette Reitzer / Troiscouleurs.fr
Published on April 14, 2022