In April, I wrote a bit about one of the most divisive love it/hate it/love-it-and-hate-it films from last January’s Sundance, Gasper Noe’s “Enter the Void.” Noe is the French director of the extremely controversial and reputedly ultra-disturbing/harrowing/violent “Irreversible” — which I wonder if I’ll be able to motivate myself to see or even if I should try — and the earlier almost-as-controversial “I Stand Alone.” His new production, a sort of fantasy film inspired by The Tibetan Book of the Dead about a deceased drug dealer wandering around Tokyo called “Enter the Void,” has divided critics. This time there’s apparently a lot more sex than violence (and I gather it’s mostly consensual — yay!) and the controversy is mainly about whether it’s a visionary work of art comparable to “2001: A Spacey Odyssey” (but with sex instead of space ships) or an extremely annoying psychedelic bore (which is what some people still think about “2001”). All I know is some of the strobe effects seem like they could really give me a headache if they go on for as long as fear they might, but there is also something very compelling and kind of enchanting here also.
Anyhow, you can read more about it via that earlier piece, and see an older French “adults only” trailer,” but first here’s the brand new looped-into-American general audiences trailer via waggish Lane Brown at the Vulture, who has dubbed it “Things to Screw in Tokyo When You’re Dead.” If you live in the right cities, it’ll be playing at an art-house relatively near you in late September.
