In Gaspar Noé's films, time plays a crucial role. Let's refresh our memories. Time is a source of tension in I Stand Alone (1999), conveyed through a warning title card ("You have thirty seconds to abandon the screening of this film"). Time is reversed in Irreversible (2002): we start at the end and arrive at the beginning. Time is further dilated in the post-mortem "trip"  Enter the Void (2009), where flashbacks intertwine with hallucinatory (subjective) visions. Time is fragmented in Love (2015), a love story that, because it rejects linearity, resembles a puzzle of memories, thus echoing the novel The Past by fellow Argentinian Alan Pauls . Finally, Vortex (2021), as the story of a couple at the end of their lives, confirms the title card of Irreversible  : time destroys everything. It was therefore natural that the interview with Gaspar Noé would revolve around time, what remains and what is no more, the future and eternity, passing through his childhood in Buenos Aires where, in the darkened theaters, the future filmmaker saw the light.

"Time reveals all" was supposed to be the original tagline for Irreversible , but it became that of "Inversion intégrale". Exactly forty years after Tintarella di Luna , your first short film, what has time revealed to you?

Gaspar Noé: "The older I get, the more hazy my memory becomes; I don't know if it's because my hard drive is full and retains less data, or if it's simply because my brain isn't working as well. I'm not very concerned about posterity—my father (Editor's note: the painter Luis Felipe Noé) is more so. In any case, as time goes by, I'm more at peace with the present than I was at twenty. Also, the older I get, the less I fear death."

My father thinks my hardest film is Vortex

Your works, however, withstand the test of time. And even have a new life, like Irreversible , which you reassembled the right way up.

Gaspar Noé: "I wonder what form films will take in the future. Their longevity depends on the future of humanity. It's not like a metal monument; films will remain if they can be played in their current format. But if there's a Third World War, the hard drives that contain them could be irradiated. Films age quickly, don't they? So I make them as I go. I'm happy to live in the present."

After the subjective camera of Enter The Void , 3D with Love or split-screen in Lux Æterna (2019) and Vortex , what would you like to experience today?

Gaspar Noé : "At one point, when technicians or actors wanted to know what my next project was, I'd say, more as a joke, that it was going to be a porno (Editor's note: which became Love ). Suddenly, many of them dropped the idea. Now, I say I'm going to make a low-budget documentary or a film with children."

There are children in all your feature films, from the "  family reunions "  in Vortex to the final sequence of Irreversible …

Gaspar Noé: "I've made quite a few films with children, but not one film entirely with children. I get along really well with them. I loved working with Emily Alyn Lind, the little girl in Enter the Void , and with Kylian Dheret, who plays the grandson in Vortex . I'd love to do that too, perhaps because it's a source of frustration: I don't have children."

Movies age quickly, don't they?

Do you then consider certain filmmakers to be spiritual sons?

Gaspar Noé: "More like little brothers or cousins, of varying ages. As a distant cousin, I adore Todd Solondz. As an adopted brother, I laugh like crazy with Vincent Gallo. It's a circle of friendship and mutual respect. Darren Aronofsky is a buddy. Now, I'm friends with Ari Aster. You get closer to the directors whose films you love. I talk regularly with Alain Cavalier. While I was editing I Stand Alone , he came to the editing room and gave me some advice. He was one of the first people I showed Climax and Vortex to ; he has a very sharp eye."

Your love of cinema began in childhood, in Buenos Aires…

Gaspar Noé: "Yes, at the age of ten or eleven, accompanied by this friend whose grandfather was a cashier at a movie theater. We'd go see two films a day. At ten, I went to see Death Wish (Michael Winner, 1972). Movie theaters were the best thing in life for me. Buenos Aires had between one hundred and two hundred of them. They've all closed down to become theaters or supermarkets. In Argentina, as everywhere else, people consume films via streaming platforms. Perhaps it's as a reaction to this that I don't have a streaming platform at home."

Does time destroy physical objects?

Gaspar Noé: "In Argentina, there isn't a single Blu-ray store left. I like the physical object: it's a collector's thing. I can't own 2001  : A Space Odyssey  (Stanley Kubrick, 1968). How can you own someone else's work? Through small plastic models or posters. But also Blu-ray. I admire Dreyer's films, like Vredens Dag (1943) or The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928); I think to myself, "Hey, I have the best edition, with this bonus feature." I once gave a DVD to dancers from Climax so they could watch a film, by me or someone else; they would put it on the shelf without knowing what to do with it, as if it were a floppy disk."

How do you perceive the evolution of the representation of sex on screen?

Gaspar Noé: "A form of puritanism has taken hold, but there are still exceptions. I think it's easier for a woman today to create explicit scenes that reflect what happens in our lives. Even in erotic productions, there are intimacy coordinators. There are fewer psychological dramas containing scenes of sexual distress. We live in a belligerent decade: it's easy to make war films with dismembered people. If it's not sexual in nature, sadism isn't a problem. What blows my mind is Instagram, which bans nipples, even though they're the source of life for any baby. We're not supposed to be in the 18th century. Nor in a religious society."

In this regard, what is the status of your film project about religion?

Gaspar Noé: "Actually, I have two, very violent ones. I don't know if, right now, people want to see a film like Pasolini's Salò (1975) or about religious barbarity. There's a rejection, after everything that happened with the Islamic State. Images of people with their throats slit, blurred or not, everyone has seen them. When I first saw Salò , it made a big impression on me. Perhaps that's why I made Irreversible ."

Irreversible is often placed in the category of "the most violent films of all time".

Gaspar Noé: "My father thinks my hardest film is Vortex . Probably because he saw his wife—my mother—lose her mind. So it reminds him of the most painful moments of his life. It's a hell that's rarely talked about."

The Irreversible Electroshock

In 2002, Irreversible was a shock. The premise? A story of rape and revenge, told in reverse. The cast? Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel, a couple at the time, as well as Albert Dupontel, all three incredibly convincing. Beyond the scandal, at Cannes and then everywhere else, due to its atrocious (and interminable) rape scene, Irreversible is a sensory masterpiece. It proves impossible to forget the aesthetic prowess of Gaspar Noé and Benoît Debie, the star cinematographer for whom this was his first feature film. The film's camera movements, its stunning special effects, its dazzling strobes, its infrasound, and the unsettling soundtrack by Thomas Bangalter, one half of Daft Punk. Even the fluidity of its sequence shots, among the craziest in the history of cinema, can be placed between Soy Cuba (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1962), the best of De Palma and Victoria (Sebastian Schipper, 2015).

Time is a recurring theme, explored through the film's reverse chronological order. The film, which essentially creates its own "spoiler," begins in hell and ends in paradise. The hands of the clock are reversed. Everything is already too late, since "everything is already written"—or rather, "everything is already filmed"—leading, through this inevitability, to the greatest of tragedies.

In 2020, Noé re-edited Irreversible from beginning to end, completing its transformation into a mirror film—or palindrome, given that the film itself was shot in chronological order. Except that the two versions are not viewed in the same way. However flawed it may be, the original version had a happy ending, that awakening sequence that could lead one to believe that everything that came before was nothing but a nightmare. In the "Complete Inversion," starting with an ode to life (love, friendship, celebration), the film has a deceptively comedic feel. Except that, to quote the title card of this new version, "time reveals all." In any case, whether viewed forwards or backwards, time has changed nothing about Irreversible: watching it remains a shock.

By Rosario Ligammari le 18/04/2024

https://lequotidien.lu/culture/cinema-gaspar-noe-je-suis-plus-en-paix-avec-le-present-qua-vingt-ans/