Enter the Void is a 2½hr-long visual trip that uses sound, lighting, and montage to replicate first-person living experience. POV sequences may be standard fare in movies, but this is the only one I've ever heard of that sustains the gimmick the whole way through. Offering more than the mundane, director Gaspar Noé runs a gamut of sensations by including a drug trip, memories, dreams, and the protagonist's death and subsequent reemergence as a disembodied psychic entity, all of which essentially happen to the viewer. In this way Void feels more like an amusement park ride than a movie, complete with induced motion sickness as well as periods of extreme boredom.
Your death occurs not far into the film and then you're a ghost for the rest of the movie; perhaps more accurately, Oscar (the main character) dies, then haunts the people and places of his life, particularly his beloved sister Linda. I can't speak highly enough of the incredible job these people did on the effects: with its steady, constant movement and flickering lights, the screen really does resemble human vision more than anything else I've seen, and the swirling surround sound of air and traffic effectively simulates a jaded, drugged wandering in the night-bright excess of underground Tokyo, down to the awkward characters who look and speak just like the many junksick alternative people I've known. The sensational domineering of the movie theater on one's consciousness goes a long way to this end, and I can only wonder how artistically effective Void will remain in the world of home video.
Besides the film's phenomenal veracity and sumptuousness, also impressive is the attachment to certain characters it manages to create given their silly dialogue and the camera's detached drifting. The latter at times actually works to the characters' advantage, showing us enough of their private lives to let us have sympathy for all, like Oscar's charmingly skeezy friend Alex and Linda's bigshot boyfriend Mario, which is nice if a little corny. That adjective also applies to the central premise of the movie, which after all, is a gimmick: at the beginning a character recounts to us/Oscar in brief the pilgrimage of the soul according to the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The film follows suit by taking us on that journey, exactly as described.
Offsetting Void's technical achievements are some problems that are worse than platitudinous. The story itself isn't really interesting; the behavior of Oscar's former community is insipid and occasionally soap-operatic; the aimless floating around between scenes gets really boring; and a few sequences (zooming in and out, in and out, on an aborted foetus that looks like a tiny baby; being inside a vagina while a giant penis thrusts in your face and then spews its load) are among the stupidest things I've ever seen in a movie. Still, in its psychedelic flashing between vision, memory, and dream, it manages never to be confusing or unclear, with the exception of one scene wherein we visit Linda's nightmare, which we are deliberately led to mistake for reality in a fake-out familiar to all moviegoers ("oh it was a dream"). The novel idea that ghosts can go into people's dreams makes a kind of sense, and it follows that a confused, newly-incorporeal being would accidentally slip into a dream of the person he's obsessing over and be absolutely bewildered until she wakes up. As participants in his subjectivity, our experience adheres.
It is ultimately ambiguous whether any of what we see really is happening, because Noé manages to get across the idea that it may be all a dream without ever condescending to really even imply it. Since at least the appearance of Ambrose Beirce's story "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" in 1890, the notion of a sustained dream/hallucination taking place in the seconds immediately surrounding the moment of death has become an increasingly replicated meme, and Noé doesn't have to resort to any kind of explanation of the concept as, say, Richard Linklater did in Waking Life; Noé's audience, ten years later, already understands it. This is the kind of assumption that Enter the Void makes to be, from its bombastic techno opening credits to the nouvelle vague "film's run out" ending, perfectly of its time in both the history of western culture and the development of film. While its moments of boredom and inanity may outnumber its moments of brilliance, I think that for anyone invested in film as art, a cinematic experiment of this magnitude shouldn't be passed over.
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