Gaspar Noé's latest both moving and disappointing

France-based director Gaspar Noé has been a festival and fan favorite here at the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma in Montreal, which I’m attending. And Noé has been a favorite of mine. Last night I saw his two latest, Vortex, made earlier this year, and Lux Aeterna, made in 2019. Vortex is a major turn from his previous work. From his first film, I Stand Alone (1998) through Irreversible (2002), Enter the Void (2009) and Climax (2018), Noé’s oeuvre has been characterized by fantastic stories of the base instincts of human beings in nihilistic worlds fueled by psychological repression, drugs and exuberant partying (no doubt a reason he has such a cult following among certain film hipsters). I Stand Alone is a mesmerizing story of a horse meat butcher (Phillipe Nahon) who descends into human butchery as we follow his increasingly alienated internal monologue. Irreversible, told in reversed chronological order, is the story of a harrowing rape and revenge. Enter the Void is a literal out of body experience through the nightclub skies of Tokyo by an assassinated drug dealer.  Climax is an ensemble story of a group of dancers’ afterparty that goes terribly wrong. But Vortex is very different indeed. Calm, quiet and with a cast of mainly two people, it’s a reflection on aging and dementia.  Noé says the film was inspired by his own near fatal brain hemorrhage in 2019 when he realized how close to death he was, and by a visit to his aging father in Argentina. The two hours and 22-minute film follows an aging couple (Italian giallo film director Dario Argento and Françoise Lebrun) in very close surroundings as they go about what turns out to be their final days. Their cramped apartment is teeming with books, magazines, video cassettes, a testament to their previous careers as Paris intellectuals, he a cinema scholar and she a psychiatrist. But in a matter of weeks their lives decline precipitously as the “dream within a dream” - which the husband philosophically describes as life at the couple’s last normal dinner together - comes to an end. While a quiet picture light years removed from his previous hip hop and psychedelia inspired cinematography, Noé is still inventive enough, screening the ending credits, in reverse order, at the film’s beginning, and shooting the movie in split screen, as if telling the stories from the characters’ individual viewpoints. There’s nothing particularly special about the story itself and in this way it kind of disappoints. It’s one we’ve all heard of or seen, of the cruelty than can be a person’s very last years. But what is remarkable is the acting, so realistic you wonder if in fact these people really are going through these experiences and only Noé, enfant terrible that he is (or was), would capture it on film. Though even he wouldn’t stoop to that level of exploitation…...The

earlier film, Lux Aeterna (Aeterna in Latin meaning indestructible), clocks in at 52 minutes, and is kind of a novella and send up of the world of filmmaking, filled with feminist imagery and themes of strong women, witchcraft, Joan of Arc and burning at the stake. Starring Charlotte Gainsbourg it has more to do with a film like Climax, with an ensemble cast caught up in disorganization and turbulence during a B movie film shoot. Personal recriminations abound as the characters almost laughably try to assemble a scene of super models being burned on the pyre. But despite the unruliness and rancor the film, perhaps because of its brevity, lacks a completeness and is unsatisfying. Vortex, by comparison, is deeply satisfying though very disappointing for anyone expecting the exuberant mayhem that has characterized Noé’s past work.