Cannes Review: Gaspar Noe’s ‘Vortex’

The cinema of filmmaker Gaspar Noé tends to skew toward the younger, stickier parts of life. Since the name-making controversy of his second feature, “Irreversible” (2002), the Argentinian filmmaker has become synonymous with a world of parties, loud music, drug-taking, and sex.

No one has ever confused Gaspar Noé for a filmmaker that likes to make four-quadrant features for the whole family. And because of this, the director is well aware that his films are very divisive and push buttons as well as boundaries.

“This stuff is junk, what we’re doing,” Bill Murray deadpans in the middle of “New Worlds: The Cradle of Civilization.” The live audience onscreen—a strange sight after a year and a half of social distancing and no live performances—laughs. Murray hams it up: “Is it too late to get some moussaka?” Then he smiles knowingly and nods.

Born in Argentina and an honorary Frenchman since his family moved there in 1976, director Gaspar Noé is the Cannes film festival’s artist-in-residence, bringing all of his features to the event since his 1998 debut Seul contre tous (AKA I Stand Alone). Noé’s films always provoke a strong reaction—many festivalgoers are still reeling from his 2002 rape-horror Irréversible—not just because of their subject matter but because of his innovative technical mastery.

Note to self: do not get old. The alternative, i.e., death, may not be very pleasant but, sedate and dignified and swathed in vaguely biblical white sheets, it doesn’t get anything like the bad press that old age does in Gaspar Noé‘s “Vortex.” Let’s not forget that in “Enter the Void,” this same director made death seem like quite the trip – infinitely preferable to the progressively demeaning ravages of dementia or the Sword of Damocles that is a dodgy ticker.

Director Vincent Maël Cardona uses western Europe in the early-1980s as the canvas upon which he paints his layered and achingly genuine portrait of young love, familial bondage, artistic aspiration, and universal chaos. Unburdened by a firm connection to any one genre or narrative archetype, “Magnetic Beats” tells a simple story with a full arsenal of source music, thoughtful set design, and crisp acting at all levels to pull off this love letter to a particular moment in time.

French cinema’s favorite enfant terrible is back at the Cannes Film Festival. Gaspar Noé returns to the French Riviera with his latest film, “Vortex,” to premiere out of competition this week in the Cannes Premiere section.

It’s a good thing you can’t catch a virus from an image because if you could, just a few frames of Kirill Serebrennikov‘s fabulously yeasty, bilious, dank Competition title, “Petrov’s Flu” would bring all of Cannes‘ anti-Covid measures to naught.

Tatiana Huezo’s eye for lyrical truth has materialized in documentaries like “Tempestad” or “The Tinniest Place,” works that penetrate some of the most tenebrous corners in recent Latin American history with shimmering compassion. Her stance as an acute observer of the people that survive and persevere through tumultuous sociopolitical and economically disadvantaged contexts produces thought-provoking filmic meditations.

Few films have accurately captured the definitive Millennial experience—lovelorn, cash-strapped, self-absorbed, and tech-addicted—though a few have tried, and some even succeeded. Modern love is no joke, as films and shows like “Frances Ha” and “Girls” know, and neither is modern friendship, or any part of early adulthood these days.

In “A Hero” (“Ghahreman”), Asghar Farhadi blurs the line of innocence and guilt in a fraught drama about the true weight of a good deed. During a two-day reprieve from prison, Rahim Soltani (Amir Jadidi) and his girlfriend Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldust) discover a handbag full of golden coins.

When teenaged environmental activist Greta Thunberg made her now-famous speech at the UN Headquarters in 2019, she was met with equal parts admiration and derision, likely an unfavorable imbalance toward the latter. For every A-list celebrity who reposted a clip on their Instagram story, adorned with enthusiastic heart emojis, surely another handful of Internet trolls lurked in the comments and left discouraging messages.

The rise in popularity of true crime stories has seen the line between genuine investigation and lurid exploitation become increasingly blurred. With every new Netflix docu-series, podcast episode, and beach-read paperback, content creators are having to go further afield to dig up some crime forgotten to history to recast in a light that often appears oriented for entertainment first, with any richer insights an inadvertent byproduct.

It would be disingenuous not to begin this review by mentioning that, yes, Panah Panahi is indeed related to the titan of Iranian cinema, Jafar Panahi.

What do we really know about children? Until the Renaissance, artists were still painting them as freakish shriveled adults. Only in the last century-ish did American society decide they probably should go to school instead of laboring all day in sweatshops.

We can all stop wishing it a long life: the new flesh is thriving, living rent-free in Julia Ducournau‘s fucked-up titanium brain, oozing from every frame of her bizarrely beautiful, emphatically queer sophomore film, and thence seeping in through your orifices, the better to colonize your most lurid, confusing nightmares, as well as that certain class of sex dream that you’d be best off never confessing to having.

“Where are you really from?” It’s an invasive question that’s awfully familiar to people of color, one that intrudes its way into our everyday lives. Though it can have innocent intentions, it’s often hostile and only works to invalidate our livelihood.

Premiering in competition at this year’s Festival de Cannes, Nanni Moretti’s wild melodrama “Three Floors” is based on a 2017 Israeli novel called “Shalosh Qomot” from writer Eshkol Nevo and begins with an undeniably tragic event. One dark night on a quiet street of Rome, a drunk driver runs over a lady crossing the road, narrowly avoids hitting a pregnant woman, then finally crashes into a building, landing straight into a family’s living room.

What do fans of Sylvan Esso dance house remixes and Bob Dylan have in common? Almost nothing, you’d imagine, and you’d probably be right. But in Clio Barnard’s sweet, unlikely romance “Ali & Ava,” which premiered as part of Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight program, the two titular characters—both from opposite musical camps—learn to find common ground in each other’s preferences and more, to share in each other’s lives.

July 12th, 2021, Cannes – Reader, I ratatat out this missive in haste on my trusty Smith-Corona from the South of France, in the paltry hopes it may adequately convey my delight in viewing the latest cinematographic marvel from Mr. Wes Anderson, originally of Houston, Texas but more latterly resident of a nearby color-coded, symmetrical nebula almost entirely of his own design.