Call it A Season in Hell.įirst, a blank canvas. Made from a page-long outline and shot in just over a fortnight, Climax feels possessed by an almost occult energy, navigating far beyond its narrative particulars to locate drug-fuelled arenas, sensorially overwhelming and flush with the agonies and ecstasies of a particularly bad trip.
But here, as in fellow self-styled provocateur Darren Aronofsky’s mother! (2017)-another hellish, single-location descent more resonant on the level of kinesthetics than metaphorical thematics-the director’s technical bona fides, impishly tasteless humour, and predilection for shock effects are channelled into the most liberating, intensely physical filmmaking of his career. It is, after all, a film that involves a pregnant woman being repeatedly kicked in the stomach, intimations and consummations of incest, and an extended joke featuring a toddler locked in a live-wire electrical closet, among other ostensible offenses. Which is not to say that Climax, which transpires across a one-night timeline that covers a dance rehearsal and after-party, doesn’t contain ample ammunition for those who find Noé a misanthropic, self-aggrandizing bore. Published in Cinema Scope 75 (Summer 2018)Īhead of Climax’s Quinzaine premiere, Gaspar Noé unveiled the movie’s hilariously boneheaded, almost exclusively text-based one-sheet: a rundown of his filmography, with each entry accompanied by a variation of presumed (not without reason) audience vitriol, capped off with an invitation (complete with a rendering of Noé mischievously grinning): “Now try Climax.” If the Argentine-born, French director’s fifth feature was, in fact, intended to provoke outrage-in addition to the poster, his comments to the press seem to indicate as much-then he failed spectacularly, having created his most broadly acclaimed work to date and winning the Directors’ Fortnight’s Art Cinema Award in the process.
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