enter the void

"Lust for Life"
Nathaniel Brown and Paz de la Huerta
photographed by Nan Goldin
V, 59
Nathaniel Brown and Paz de la Huerta are the stars of Gasper Noe's latest foray into the trippy and disturbing in "Enter the Void." The film debuted at Cannes this week and tells the story of a dead drug dealer who looks over his sister as she grieves in the neon lit world of Tokyo. I've seen his last two films, "Irreversible" and "I Stand Alone", both of which are deeply unsettling films, but at least are consistent in their shocking tone and artful construction. Manohla Dargis of The New York Times had this to say about "Enter the Void":

What largely distinguishes it, beyond the stunning cinematography, is that this is the work of an artist who’s trying to show us something we haven’t seen before, even while he liberally samples images and ideas from Stanley Kubrick and the entirety of American avant-garde cinema. The grungy milieu and calculated shocks might have been designed to make you flee — even while your attention is tethered to the camera — but, really, these aren’t the point. The point is the filmmaking.