Gaspar Noé is one of the foremost purveyors of feel bad cinema, having built a successful career off of his love of making audiences squirm. His earlier work, notably Irréversible, Enter the Void and Climax, is filled with explicit, visceral images depicting humanity at its most chaotic. Watching these films, you get the impression he relishes putting us, much like his characters, through the proverbial wringer.
By comparison, Vortex is a positively moribund affair. An agonisingly slow-paced portrait of ageing in all its inglorious banality, it centres on an elderly couple (played by Dario Argento and Françoise Lebrun, whose names are accompanied by their respective birth years in the opening credits) living out their last days in a cluttered apartment in Paris.
Lui, a self-confessed hoarder, is writing a book on cinema, dreams and memory, while Elle, a retired psychiatrist, is struggling with dementia. We see their daily routines play out in parallel as both attempt to preserve some semblance of normalcy in the face of Elle’s worsening condition.
The film’s split-screen format means our focus constantly switches from one frame to the other, studying the miscellany of items the couple have amassed over the course of their marriage. Yet, despite the lived-in nature of their domicile, there is very little information about these characters to be gleaned from scanning their surroundings.
Beyond a few light expositional details, we’re given almost no insight into who these people are, or the rich and interesting lives they must have lived. They are more or less blank canvases onto which Noé projects his anxieties about his own mortality. (In 2020 the director suffered a near fatal brain haemorrhage, from which he has fully recovered.)
Vortex briefly gains some narrative momentum when Lui and Elle’s son Stéphane (Alex Lutz) drops in to check on his ailing folks, but much of the film’s near two-and-a-half-hour runtime is spent quietly observing the couple as their physical and mental health steadily declines.
For long stretches, time simply passes in this oxygenless liminal space. It’s an oddly compelling, if at times uncomfortably voyeuristic, viewing experience – like staring at a photograph of two strangers whose faces are fading away.
If this is Noé at his most compassionate and vulnerable, it’s telling that Vortex ultimately lacks the raw emotional impact of Michael Haneke’s Amour, another brutally honest, skilfully acted chamber piece about dementia and death, or Florian Zeller’s more recent The Father. Like those films, this is an intimate, formally inventive examination of the cruelties of old age, but there’s a detached quality to Noé’s approach which, ironically, may leave some viewers cold.
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ANTICIPATION.
Gaspar Noé is one of cinema’s most arresting image makers, but his recent form has been patchy. 3
ENJOYMENT.
Equal parts absorbing and agonising. Argento and Lebrun are immense. 3
IN RETROSPECT.
A tough watch – and not always in the way the director intends. 3
Directed by
Gaspar Noé
Starring
Dario Argento, Françoise Lebrun, Alex Lutz
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