Gaspar Noe is one of the riskier filmmakers working today. Filmmakers who take bold swings are certainly fun to watch, because you’re pretty much guaranteed to see something completely different from normal corporate movie fare. When Noe succeeds (Irreversible, Enter the Void), his powerful images and directing combine with a great story to leave a memorable imprint on the audience. When Noe doesn’t like in Climax, his style can’t overcome the sheer brutality and cruelty of the subject matter he’s trying to cover.
Climax follows a French dance troupe in the 1990s. After a particularly stressful dance shoot, the group loosens up at night, throwing a party where they can get a little drunk and maybe hook up with one another. After an hour or so partying, Selva (Sofia Boutella) notices that the sangria has much more potency than she’s used to. Panicked, she confronts the sangria maker Emmanuelle (Claude-Emmanuelle Gajan-Maull) who insists she did nothing, but its clear someone has spiked the sangria with LSD, forcing the troupe into a psychedelic nighttime escapade that none of them will ever forget.
The first thing anyone will notice from a Gaspar Noe is his knack for visual flair. Here’s my first experience watching a film from this guy. Noe uses all the tricks in his arsenal to make us understand what happens during an LSD trip across a group of feral, beautiful, isolated, narcissistic dancers. The first half of the movie is a combination of talking head interviews/dance party conversations and lengthy single take shots of sensual dance sequences showing off how athletic and beautiful everyone in the troupe is. On the surface, Noe is letting us know his characters and getting us into the dancing (I was bopping for sure); however, what he’s doing is ripening us for the psychological descent, and the visual style he is famous for. As the descent goes deeper and deeper for everyone, the colors start to change and become WAY more pronounced. The colors also start to reflect your feelings: if you’re feeling scared, maybe that brown/redish dance floor becomes 100% blood red. In addition, the unbroken dances at the start become more and more disjointed, almost epileptic, in the sheer number of cuts, disorienting everyone as someone on LSD probably would be.
However, the success of Climax rests on us being captivated by the story going on. Noe does give us a host of characters so his movie is not reliant on any one character to succeed. However, I think Noe underestimates his own self-sabotage capability at times. The dancing sequences go on for an exceptionally long period of time, to the point where as good as they are, the pulsating becomes exhausting. Maybe that’s the point, but it’s not high entertainment. Noe’s actors, except Sofia Boutella, are dancers first, having no acting experience. Because of that, it’s hard for many of them to really sell the brutal transformations some of the characters have to go through, meaning the big plot developments are just gruesome to be gruesome, and will surely make large swaths of the audience uncomfortable. Noe does succeed in showing us what a terrible LSD trip might look like, but that certainly doesn’t make Climax high entertainment worthy of a watch except in artistic circles.
If you grow up conservatively, and don’t want to partake in any drugs, but still want to understand what using a psychedelic might feel like, look no further than Climax. Gaspar Noe’s vision is all over this film, but that includes his warts as well as his highlights. For a visual filmmaker as gifted as Noe, Climax is another sensual success, just not an overall one. In basesball, that’s just one strike. Movie hitters as good as Noe will find out how to generate another hit again, but maybe don’t see Climax if you like sunshine and rainbow storytelling.