#tapdancing my way to the finish line | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

allthefilmsiveseenforfree · 5 years

Text

Climax

This will be short and sweet because um...I don’t know what the fuck this is. I went into this film knowing nothing, which I don’t do very often but it’s a fun change of pace every once in awhile. Wife said, “hey let’s check out this weird dancing movie” and you know what they say - happy wife, happy psychedelic French nightmare acid trip.

Climax, written and directed by Gaspar Noe from a 5-page script, is a feverish trip through one crazy night in an abandoned school where a French dance troupe has finished their final days of rehearsals and are blowing off some steam on their last night together. They listen to music, they dance, they go off into corners to gossip about each other, and they drink a lot of sangria which TURNS OUT has been laced with some serious LSD. Shit goes off the rails about 45 minutes in. So was this, overall, a bad trip or was there something meaningful to be gained from all the prismacolor debauchery? Well...

I...I don’t know. I really don’t know how I feel about this one.

Some thoughts:

Technically, Noe’s direction is certainly intriguing and visceral. When the acid really starts to hit at the 45 min mark, he’s made the choice to flash the opening credits of all the dancers’ names on the screen, while the camera rotates the shot in the background. It made me feel so dizzy and disoriented that, combined with the thumping bass line of the music that pulses through the film like a heartbeat, I began to feel like I was actually high.

The anxiety builds as the characters, led by the captivating Sofia Boutella, begin to realize they’ve been dosed and start turning on each other Lord of the Flies style. Anyone who’s ever been too fucked up will empathize with the growing horror of that feeling of I just want to be sober again and I CAN’T GET SOBER. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film that so accurately encapsulates this feeling.

I say that Boutella is captivating, and she is - I’ve been in love with her since Kingsman: The Secret Service - but she also has a 10-minute segment in the middle of the film in which she’s just wandering through hallways screaming. On the one hand, I’m with her and I get it. On the other...I can’t take this seriously even a little bit.

The dancing is incredible. Each dancer has their own distinct personality, the crew is made up of diverse body types, skin tones, nationalities, and gender presentations, and it’s really a joy to watch the choreographed 10-minute dance scene that begins the party. I was trying to eat my dinner while watching the film and I had to stop because I simply couldn’t take my eyes away from the screen or move at all, I was so transfixed by the dance performance.

Even better, there’s a second long dance sequence after the acid hits, shot from above, and it’s fascinating to see the differences in the dancers’ movements and expressions as they each dance, one by one, in the middle of a circle of the others. The perspective of looking down on them in unnerving, making their bodies seem alien and strange because we’re not used to seeing stage pictures of dance looking this way. The dancing was by far my favorite aspect of the film.

HOWEVER, one of the big drawbacks to the film IS that the cast is made up of professional dancers - not actors. Let’s just say some people’s trips are more convincingly realized than others.

Also, maybe this is just me, but why wouldn’t you just go into one of the 40 weird little bedrooms and go to sleep??

There’s also a bunch of pretty weird pretentious stage dressing that feels wildly unnecessary - a series of video interviews introducing each dancer takes up the first 7 minutes or so, but the shot is framed as if we’re watching them on an old tv set surrounded by French books with titles that are references to Noe’s influences like Suspiria, Roman philosophers, other things that make me want to roll my eyes so hard I die. Also, the closing credits are shown in the first 2 minutes, the closing credits are at the 45 minute mark, and the film’s title appears in the final 8 seconds. Jesus tapdancing christ.

Ironically, the film’s weakest point was its climax - Noe builds up the dancers’ descent into violence, uninhibited sexuality, and animalistic physicality into a crescendo that yields a 15 minute segment where the camera is upside down, and it’s impossible to discern who is who or what is happening in between flashes of darkness. I know that’s probably the point, but after the first few minutes of this, I could feel myself slipping into apathy because if I can’t see anything or discern anything that’s happening, I have no idea what you want me to feel about what’s happening. It did inspire me to never EVER try LSD, though.

In spite of its wankery, I can’t bring myself to hate this movie, mostly because the experience of watching it was so forcefully captivating. It’s worth checking out if you are in the mood for something completely different and certainly interesting, as long as you have the patience for lots of subtitles (pretty much all the spoken language is French) and more than a little depravity.

[gif credit]

#119in2019 #climax movie #climax 2018 #gaspar noe #sofia boutella #climax review #movie reviews #film reviews

197 notes · View notes