Gaspar Noé has a strong reputation among critics for provocative movies that often skirt the line of good taste, and seems to revel in his ability to shock or even repulse audiences while similarly challenging them with his stories. This year’s Climax is probably his best-received film, even though it was made with just a loose outline, employed mostly non-actors, and took just a few weeks to film. It’s a nightmare come to life, one that is more revealing than horrifying, but also clearly crosses the line into poor taste.
Climax is based loosely on an actual story of a French dance troupe whose afterparty was spoiled because someone spiked their drinks with LSD, although in that case no serious harm came to any of the dancers. That is not true in Noé’s retelling here, as the party devolves into Lord of the Flies-level savagery because someone spiked the punch, made by the troupe’s den mother Emmanuelle, with LSD or a similar psychotropic drug. (The very end of the film makes it seem like it was LSD, although the dancers never know this.)
The drugs really are beside the point in Climax, which explores the nature of fear and how quickly we come to distrust others when we think we’re in danger. Noé wrote an outline and some general directions but asked the actors, most of whom were professional dancers without acting experience, to simply act as they would if under the influence, showing them videos of people who’d taken LSD or other hallucinogens. There are two professionals in the cast, Sofia Boutella (Selva) and Souheila Yacoub (Lou), who do more heavy lifting than anyone else, the former as the de facto social leader of the group, the latter the one character with something resembling a storyline.
Noé’s hand is all over the film even though there wasn’t a proper script. There’s one continuous shot that runs over 40 minutes, shifting perspectives and angles, drifting to different characters, that helps convey the dancers’ disorientation to the viewers. He also moved the closing credits to the beginning of the movie, and the typical title card with cast listing to the middle, which felt more like a gimmick to me than an important change. (Plus Adam McKay did it better in Vice.) He made one truly regrettable decision, the part of the film that crosses the line into needless suffering; Emmanuelle’s son is at the party, and while I won’t spoil it, what that child is put through did not need to be in this movie at all. Noé could have accomplished everything he wanted to accomplish without that. Assuming the boy’s inclusion was an active decision by Noé, it was a blatant attempt to shock the audience for shock’s sake.
Several days after watching Climax, I can’t decide if I think the film is good. I would say I didn’t enjoy watching it, because it is so unpleasant (by design) to watch the dancers lose control of themselves and their situation, wandering around a dark building that looks like an abandoned school or mental institution. I also couldn’t stop watching it, and was past the halfway mark before I even thought about how much time might have passed, and it’s certainly had me thinking about it in the time since I watched. There is something essential about stories that remind us of the thin line between the way we live and utter anarchy, of the tiny genetic barrier that separates us from chimpanzees, of the social norms we take for granted that allow us to live our daily lives. When one brick is removed, the entire edifice could collapse. Noé is willing to stare into that abyss and show us what he sees.