Welcome to Hell:
Climax
Climax (2018), the latest film of Argentine-based French director Gaspar Noé, begins at a calm pace and then appears as a film where violence is escalating and dragging us into the hell it created. Watching a Gaspar Noé film is “even captivity” at first, because his cinema is not the kind of emotion caressing naive, leaving sad tears or big smiles behind him. Its unique style lies in the fact that it is not a box office success, but a Gaspar Noé experimentation, which means that the name of the Magic Lantern is written in gold letters. Climax is a movie that takes its place in Psychedelic Cinema without any exaggeration of the basic elements of pure cinema that the director has presented to the audience in the most direct way without any hesitation.
“You despised Alone Against Everyone. You hated 'No Return'. You disgusted with 'emptiness'. You cursed 'Love.' Also try Climax. ”
Gaspar Noé first called out with a poster he shared from his own Instagram account before entering the vision. We have also seen from here that the invitation to the hell it created has an "try" invitation card, which is not an easy-to-remove production for the audience.
Being inspired by the real story, Climax is about to get a group of dancers out of control at a party held after rehearsals in an abandoned school in France in a winter of 1996. Although the subject seems pure and plain, the Gaspar Noé offers a kinetic feast that is conveyed to us in the viewfinder, and what we will witness begins with the out of control mankind's freaking insanity and extends to the demonization process. To mention from the beginning, this feast shows itself in the form of soul-body, good-bad, beautiful-ugly, not space-light, camera-motion.
"Being is a temporary illusion."
The opening (part one) begins with Lou (Souheila Yacoub) screaming in snow and blood. Although this is generally referred to as referring to The Shining, it shows that the events we will witness in the future will actually deteriorate something, or the concrete part of hell is going on there, and then an interview with the dancers that will last about 10 minutes. This section, where experiences about dance, relationships, fears and drugs are expressed, are narrated from a television framed by books and films. While Gaspar is considering Noé Climax as a book, this plan, which he took as a subtext, does not send greetings. From Possession (Andrzej Żuławski - 1981 psychological horror drama movie) to Vibroboy (Jan Kounen - 1994) from Suspiria (Dario Argento - 1977 horror movie) to 120 Days of Salo or Sodom (Pier Paolo Pasolini - 1975 drama / art film).
And two of the most remarkable books: one of them is Taxi Driver (which we see as a book from Richard Elman pen), Gaspar Noé's favorite movie, and the other is Suicide, mode d’emploi (Suicide handbook by Claude Guillon). The opening adorned with all these works really tells us how to read Climax. While the interview flows with ordinary thoughts, ordinary plans, simple dialogues without being under any pressure within the potential of human existence, we do not encounter any boring situation that will work within us. Because the danger begins with the hidden messages in the background. Even though this scene was added to the movie at the last minute, Gaspar Noé's agile intelligence shows itself at the opening. “Being” is a concept that we see in all the films of this director. We also see the pure existence of Dion Fortune's Cosmic Doctrine as "Not manifested." According to him, the beginning of everything is a resource. This source, which has not yet been manifested, is essence, pure and continuous. Everything else is just an illusion. Based on this, Gaspar Noé's interview, without empathizing with the audience, expresses how much the human brain is capable of “deceiving” with a fiction (in the context of thought), not the hidden thoughts. This section, which should be watched carefully, offers us the key to hell and allows us to understand Noé's provocative stance. It should not be forgotten that the things we will witness in the first minutes are a lean Gaspar Noé interview and the episode ends with "We proudly present a French movie". We haven't entered hell yet. As the witnesses of the story that takes place in one place, we carry the door of the impulses that will cause people to be brutalized, ugly and degenerate, in places with our thoughts to play with our body in places. A wonderful choreography and camera movements accompanied by the reinterpreted shape of the Cerrone - Supernature (September 1977 - Disco) piece after the end of the interview. Gaspar Noé prepares us for "suffering", which will start in the future, in this episode where the audience is most appreciated after the movie.
"Birth is an extraordinary experience."
In the claustrophobic atmosphere dominated by the red color, the dialogues between the actors, which we are not accustomed to in the cinema other than the Gaspar Noé style, show how cruel people are when the problematic people are sober - especially men. These youngsters sipping sangria (a fruit wine cocktail) are not yet aware of the LSD (Lisergic acid diethylamide) participating in sangria - until now we don't know who did this until we saw the last scene - Gaspar Noé precisely the dialogues in this section. Although he says that we use it with jokes in our daily lives, in reality, it shows how human beings can become so ugly and we can present it with a tiny “illusion” that exists in life without any need for it to do so. When Selva (Sofia Boutella) first started to discover the strange and inconceivable situation in humans, she stated that this was a drug effect, and Gaspar Noé hell takes place after that.
Climax, which shows how women who are desperate in the face of arrogant men, takes a party that started in a normal course with the effect of drugs, to the center of anarchy and psychedelic crisis, partly with our nerves, and partly shows how the emotions will drift into chaos.
Gaspar Noé is a director who analyzes the shuttle weave between the Neocortex and the Limbic system well. There is no doubt that this is the thing he loves most to disturb the audience. Wherever there is contradiction, perversity, overdoing, it takes the extreme points and presents them in a synthesis. Noé is a director who avoids dialogue with the audience. What he wants from us is to enable us to melt in the crucible of the methods he uses to hypnotize us in captivity of what he gives. Long sequences, wide angles, top (top) shots, rotating camera, space, light are all-rounder, but they do not contain anything that every audience will love about story and operation. Although Gaspar Noé is behind the scenes in terms of getting to know his cinema and himself, Climax is a great movie from Noé.