Salo. A Serbian Film. Cannibal Holocaust. What is horrific cinema? Provocateur Gaspar Noé made a name for himself with Irreversible’s enduring rape shot and with Climax he returns with a party of X-Factor type wannabes who find fame might be a bad trip. It is beautifully made and has a soundtrack featuring the likes of Aphex Twin, but the storyline’s is not far off par from the average goss mag.
Perhaps based on a true story, a crew of star-chasers start off expository-docu style for the trip of a lifetime. By baring their souls to an audition tape watched on a TV (surrounded by books on the film’s influences, obviously), they stand to dance their way into the Culture club. They deserve it – the dance pieces are utterly inspiring and in the process, we learn gradually about the interrelationships that influence their styles and make them tick. Of course, tics also breed irritation; soon someone is out to get them and the party turns sour.
The performers are magnificent. You will rarely have seen more vacuous, self-serving group of characters. Noé’s excruciatingly long birds-eye view section shows these preeners in a group hug of a dance that descends into something between (but not daring to be) a brawl and an orgy as they vogue and cast shade at each other only 30 years after Madonna brought the style to the mainstream.
Sucked into the action via melted-sweet lighting, you watch a significant proportion of Climax at an upside-down Dutch angle with a soundtrack consisting largely of pounding music and undulating screams. It’s atmospheric and disorientating, but also pretty hard for it not to be. This becomes more the case as the film includes Noé’s almost obligatory (but easily disentangleable) structural interferences.
Thematically, tensions appear in the troupe’s races, politics, habits, sexualities, and genders and there is some shockingly realistic violence, but shocking because of who commits it rather than the violence itself, which is short and then done with. If this is amoral or an indictment, Noé perhaps needs to update his playbook on identity politics. Woozy is then the order of the day as the dancing veers from hyper-speed technical experiment to grotesque inhuman morph regardless of the out of control party in the living quarters. The mood becomes quasi-comic. Several situations that seem outrageous when shot at a strange angle are actually quaint in Noé’s determination to be avant-garde or outrageous if you have actually been to a student party this century, and horrific tableau seem sweet in showing remaining humanity savoured. It is a pity, mind, that some of the more extreme sights promised either never come to visual fruition or are simply telegraphed.
Climax is a technical masterpiece, and that’s not surprising considering Noé’s clout and experience. As a story, it’s a standard indictment of the nature of modern media culture. That its violence is realistic is laudable; that its confused, ‘edgy’ politics are antiquated is embarrassingly not.
CLIMAX / CERT: 18 / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: GASPER NOÉ / STARRING: SOFIA BOUTELLA, ROMAIN GUILLERMIC, SOUHEILA YACOUB / RELEASE DATE: SEPTEMBER 21ST
