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Having debuted to widespread acclaim at the Cannes Film Festival, it focuses on an elderly couple (played by Françoise Lebrun and Dario Argento) who spend their days in a Paris apartment. Both love and care for each other, but are grappling with the early stages of dementia. Presented in split-screen, we follow the couple as they go about their daily routines both together and alone. As everyday tasks become more challenging, forgetfulness shifts to something more troubling and their son (Alex Lutz) struggles to care for them as they enter a vortex of mental and physical degeneration. Compelling and moving in equal measure, this is a departure for Noé - but in terms of scope and ambition, it is one of his finest works. (Picturehouse Entertainment)
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Life with film, film about life, life after film and film after life. At first glance, Noé’s departure from conceptual games with genres, form and film as a sensory attack aimed at the realms of Bergman and Haneke is unexpected but, at its core and in accordance with its subject matter, unavoidable. Though the topic changes, the creative signature and motifs remain unmistakable. Noé continues to crush viewers, only this time not so much by playing games with the material and medium of film as by mercilessly bringing the end of life to the audience’s attention. If Noé, being true to his youthful and rebellious nature, had previously shown us life as a fleeting dream and an extreme experience, this time he reveals its end as a spiral between a helpless wakefulness and a kindly nightmare that brings everything that came before to the final fade-out.
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A real-time documentary odyssey about aging and dying in an uncompromising performance by a controversial filmmaker who isn't afraid to push the envelope and doesn't flinch at moments when others would be cutting and turning their cameras away so that the viewer has to "guess" the rest. Gaspar Noe conveys a complex experience in a different style that suits some, while others will walk out during the screening. Vortex is not about seeing it more than once, it's about experiencing it in the cinema just once, even though it's very difficult, even unbearable at times.
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This time Gaspar Noé has abandoned his usual visual flourishes and stroboscopic frenzy and brought to the screen a fairly conventional, human narrative about old age and the loss of vitality. Sadly, after Haneke's Amour and even the recent emotionally devastating The Father, despite Gaspar Noé’s distinctive split-screen with two perspectives approach, Vortex already feels like selling ice to the Eskimos. What is worse, it is also a rather tedious movie, which at times feels very much like it is treading water and much longer than it should be. I have to admit that I have not had such an exhausting screening experience in a long time. If only a hundred of your hairs have turned grey during a screening of Vortex, you are lucky. I have conflicted feelings about it, however, one good thing about it is that legendary director Dario Argento is a natural acting talent who should have been cast in a significant role a long time ago. [KVIFF 2021]
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Vortex is a slight departure from the previous work of the visually distinctive provocateur Gaspar Noé – the inventive creative form using a split picture and bold dividing lines in the editing remains, but in terms of content, the extreme wildness and liveliness has been replaced by a cadaverous slowness, which goes hand in hand with the story of the restless lives and dying of two elderly spouses, one of whom is a few years removed from a heart attack and the other progressively succumbing to Alzheimer’s disease. For some, this could be an original artistic horror movie that naturalistically depicts the last stage of life without shying away from even the cruelest moments (and with great acting performances), but on the other hand, it’s also painfully soul-crushing, unbearably long and exceedingly boring due to its insistence on showing the two main characters’ endless tottering through the interior locations of their labyrinthine apartment. Noé fulfilled his dream by casting the famous Italian director Dario Argento in the film and adapting the color stylization to suit the nature of his work, but the other noteworthy aspect of Vortex is the camerawork, which captures the same story from two different perspectives, which you have to watch at the same time. The combination of all of these elements may evoke in you the distressing feelings of a helpless and sick pensioner at the end of life, but in this case death is a form of liberation mainly for the viewer.
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Two eyes of the glassy gaze of old age, to which illness has flattened life into a thin surface without the depth of the field of the past and future, completely adhering to the technique of dual projection onto a screen, whose flatness at the level of the media is coextensive with the targeted content of the work, which is increasingly dulled and emptied staring into the eyes of death, and where the extension of cinematic time only timidly reminds us of the actual length of the real final countdown, of which both cinematic eyes can tell us nothing new, precisely because the eyes of the film are the eyes of its protagonists. Where there is no past and future, there can fortunately never be a conventional entertaining plot, and so the viewer can truly only wait for liberation along with the characters. That is also the contribution of Noé's film, that through the split screen, which is not just an end in itself, he allowed, at the core of a conventional dramatic film, one eye to peek at the techniques of direct cinema, and thus get closer to the documentary reality through fiction.
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