LUX ÆTERNA & VORTEX: The Split Screen Theatrics Of A God

It comes with the territory of Gaspar Noé to be overwhelming and overbearing. He, like Alejandro Jodorowsky, isn’t a filmmaker who really pulls punches when he’s doing something of value. He doesn’t take half measures and oftentimes, in rather cringe-inducing or eye-rolling but still respectably stubborn ways, he will let you know how much he thinks of himself and his own style. After all, his debut film Seul contre tous (1999) featured a disclaimer before the last seven minutes that counts down 30 seconds with a warning to viewers that they should turn the movie off now if they don’t want to see some really messed up stuff. In one of his latest films Lux Æterna, a similar disclaimer appears for people who are epileptics or generally just have a hard time sitting through extended periods of flashing light and colors.

At The Whims of Men – Lux Æterna

In Lux Æterna, Gaspar Noé is fully in the same mode as he used for his previous film Climax (2019). It’s a slow-burn buildup of human tension and interaction erupting into a denouement that is totally and singularly Noe, to both illuminating and frustrating levels. The film takes place almost entirely on a film set, though it is preceded in most screenings by a hypnotic montage of Cecil B. DeMille snippets that try to get you in the mood of the film’s thesis – “director as GOD”. Then, the actual movie begins with footage of 1920s witchcraft and torture. It cuts to Charlotte Gainsbourg and Beatrice Dalle, playing fictional versions themselves speaking about differing film experiences they had. These range from topical conversations of the film to sexually explicit moments that affected them. The movie then roves around a film set where Beatrice’s directorial efforts are consistently being undermined and Charlotte is being hounded by a young upstart filmmaker Karl (Karl Glusman) who is trying to recruit her to his next project.

Noe implements the split screen strategy that he did in both Climax and in Vortex to build a comprehensive visual and planar disparity between different aspects of the thing that he is examining – in this case, a film set. He roves around to the producers, actors, set designers, make-up artists, and an array of other people involved in Beatrice’s production. He has his actresses talk about them beforehand to let us know where the tension lies, then goes around to those people and dispels all the underlying politics under the production. The producer wants the DP to be the shadow-director and hatches a scheme to get Beatrice fired by having a cameraman follow her around discretely to record if she screws up anywhere so he can fire her. Charlotte is torn between the production and a phone call from her young daughter who says she had a classmate threaten and potentially hurt her genital area with a knife. Noé’s insistence on lining violence against women has gotten him in hot water before.

To say that Lux Æterna may be Noé’s most ‘feminist film’ is a bit of an overreach (it’s also not saying much considering his other projects), but hardly has any recent film so candidly depicted the male mentality of feeling entitled to the attention and unconditional labor of women on set. Charlotte is busy getting ready and mentally prepared for her scene yet Karl continuously and relentlessly tries to badger her with his “brilliant project”. When she’s overwhelmed and just needs space he retreats into wanting success-revenge against her. “These actresses, they all have an expiry date. She’s going to be eating out the palm of my hand when my movie makes it to festivals,” he tells his buddy. Towards the end of the film, she is demanded by the male cinematographer to cry and scream during her shoot even though she is visually uncomfortable and in pain. Dalle meanwhile is undermined constantly in her efforts to make a cinematic vision her own. Other actresses are asked to strip naked without having given them advanced notice before they signed onto the production and are given no direction other than to bend to the whims of various men on the set telling them (often with contradiction) what to do.

The cacophony and confusion created by Noé in the film impressively build to a silent, overwhelming conclusion of flashing lights that swallows the sound and visual canvas whole. Noé’s cinema is often leading to an endpoint of total annihilation of the frame. His camerawork is radical in its bursts of movement and hectic, scurrying, tracking shots. The split-screen is used to point action in multiple parts of the story, but it always coalesces into the frame becoming a dead entity where nothing is happening.

Miscommunication in the Void – Vortex

Likewise, the visual aesthetic of Vortex takes this arc as well. Noe creates tension and contrast through time and narrative juxtaposition of events again using a split screen to conjure up all the dissonance. It’s a devastating trick that renders the film a strong, if conceptually shallow, emotional impact. Empathy or sentimentality is not one of his strong suits and Vortex requires patience to get its points across. If Lux Æterna is a ‘slow-burn’ then Vortex is a slow-dissolve. Noé is best when he’s leaning into the edge-lord cinema that he’s known for, but he is clearly thinking deeper and more personally with this movie. It’s informed by his own mother’s bout with Alzheimer’s and it depicts the disease as one of the tragic misunderstandings.

Vortex begins its descent into tragedy right from the beginning when the screen slowly splits in two as a couple, only known as The Mother (Françoise Lebrun) and The Father (Dario Argento) is sleeping. For the rest of the movie, these two will be interconnected as a couple but completely disconnected visually to render their actions and reactions as disjointed moments. Noe’s visual trick here first becomes clear in a sequence where Mother turns the burner on and then forgets to turn it off. For an entire minute as Father and Mother are roaming about the apartment, we see a still shot of the burner flame overtaking the pot and the potential of an explosion is constantly on our minds. Like in Lux Æterna, where Noé demands we pay attention to the possible turmoil being caused by characters acting in opposite directions, or to opposite ends, in Vortex, we see Alzheimer’s as a disease hardly understood by anyone who isn’t suffering from it.

There are moments of heartbreaking clarity in the film as Father and Mother try and re-try to communicate as the latter’s condition worsens. We see their faces at the same time due to the split screen. It allows for unambiguity in the movements of their eyes and mouths, and the intricacies with which they look at each other. Yet, for all its intimate and personal effects, Noé’s film does suffer from the tediousness of having his singular style unable to fully mesh in with the film’s heavy subject matter. He, of course, is steadfast in maintaining the angles and theatrics of his visual experiments but it causes the movie to flow in and out of interest too often. Yet, when it does it – like when Mother dumps all of Father’s manuscripts in the trash – it hits very hard.

Conclusion

Both Lux Æterna and Vortex are consciously and subconsciously, like all Noe films, obsessed with the role of a director as a God. The former includes quotes from filmmakers who are Noé’s idols – Jean Luc Godard, Carl Th. Dreyer, Rainer W. Fassbinder. He presents their quotes on the filmmakers’ role as tomes and commandments to live by. He orchestrates a film set as a microcosmic representation of what he loathes and loves about the industry. In Vortex, he commands the lives of his two main actors in separate boxes as they both approach death. Noé’s split screen theatrics allows for double the amount of decision-making, double the choreography, and double the narrative trickery. He doesn’t command half a frame, he commands two whole frames instead of just one.

Lux Æterna was released in theaters in the U.S  on May 3rd, 2022

Vortex was released in theaters in the U.S. on May 6th, 2022

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjMI–sG7ek