Vortex, the most intimate and restrained film by French provocateur Gaspar Noé, premiered internationally at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival.
Lui (director Dario Argento) and Elle (Françoise Lebrun) have been married for many years. He is writing a book about dreams and movies, recalling his mistress, and taking care of his wife, who is a former doctor now suffering from dementia. Traveling through their labyrinthine home, filled with hundreds of books and objects that witnessed the life of their family, the viewer observes the sunset of their personal era.
Vortex echoes both Michael Haneke’s Amour, about the love and death of an older couple, and the realistically liberating story of a daughter and a sick mother in Mia Hansen-Løve’s Things to Come. The films have in common not only the similarity of the protagonists but also the sincere tone of the authors. The stories of families going through loss and death are both tragic and mundane in terms of their inevitability and their incorporation into everyday life.
Noé, whose mother had dementia, draws on that experience, transferring the path of caring for a disappearing loved one to the screen. Together with the cinematographer of four of his films, Benoît Debie, he divides the images into two channels, underlining the loneliness and mental mismatch of the characters. Having introduced this visual experiment in Lux Æterna in 2019, with Vortex he hones it to perfection.
Rebellion and a striving for openness are elements of Noé’s signature cinematic language. Here they are revealed in a peremptory, straightforward look at the structure and facets of life. Aging, the tactility of family members manifested through significant touches of hands and long sympathetic glances, and the contradictory emotions flowing into each other are explicitly shown on the screen. The intimate performances of Argento and Lebrun is contrasted with the stories of their son (Alex Lutz) and grandson (Kylian Dheret), who represent the future and life, giving the film’s emotional intonation a hint of hope.
The film will be screened in French and English with Russian subtitles.
Vortex
Dir. Gaspar Noé
France, Belgium, Monaco, 2021. 142 min. 16+