Direction: Gaspar Noé
Country: France
The Argentine-born Paris-based helmer Gaspar Noé is a known shocker who likes to draw attention to himself through a so called ‘originality’ that never truly convinced me. If his early work - I Stand Alone (1998); Irreversible (2002); Enter the Void (2009) - was marked with a painful grittiness that got me involved, then the last two features - Love (2015) and Climax (2018) - were exhaustingly egotist and too ridiculous to deserve any merit. His new outing, Lux Aeterna, is a 51-minute ride into the backstage of a film about witches, in which actresses Charlotte Gainsbourg (Antichrist; Melancholia) and Béatrice Dalle (Betty Blue; Time of the Wolf) play bizarre versions of themselves. The more relaxed posture and discreet demeanors of the former contrasts with the off-center, confrontational and emotionally fake personality of the latter.
The film, funded and co-produced by Saint Laurent’s creative designer Anthony Vaccarello, starts with a droll, casual conversation between the protagonists before slips into a frantic work environment presented with busy split screens and populated by misguided and unsatisfied extras, a treacherous producer, an irritable director, a presumptuous cinematographer, and obnoxious outsiders who don’t respect anyone in the set. At this point, I was very much amused with the unprofessional, tense and maniacal ambiance depicted, as well as the set decoration by Samantha Benne.
Unfortunately, Noé resolved to explore a nihilistic avant-garde territory in the film’s last section, which culminates with pointless neon-soaked flashing visuals, an ominous score, and a general sense of cheap paranoia.
Lux Aeterna is a shamefully underdeveloped charade whose uncomfortable viewing says absolutely nothing relevant in the end, apart from those quotations from directors such as Dreyer, Fassbinder and Godard.
