Film Review – Vortex (2021)
It’s a generic-sounding title – not what you’d expect from a director with a reputation for courting controversy – but Gaspar Noe has pinpointed the perfect word for his latest. Vortex. An environmental phenomenon, described as “a mass of air or water that spins around very fast and pulls objects into its empty centre”, it’s exactly what happens not just to the people at the centre of the story, but for the watching audience as well.
An elderly couple enjoy a glass of wine together on their plant-filled balcony. It’s a picture of “grow old with me, the best is yet to come”, full of colour and contentment. When we next see the setting, the plants have wilted, shrivelled up, lost their leaves and flowers, mirroring what’s happening indoors. The couple don’t have names. He is Lui (Dario Argento), she is Elle (Francoise Lebrun) and he a writer, she a psychiatrist. But while he continues working on a new book, she’s declining mentally, prescribing herself medication that’s wrong for her. She’s not been to see a doctor about her condition and he can’t face doing anything about it, even though he’s more than aware what’s happening. Her decline escalates, her moments of lucidity becoming less frequent – she turns on the gas and forgets about it, she “tidies his desk” and destroys all the notes for his book. Their only son, Stephane (Alex Lutz) has problems of his own and struggles to make his father understand that his mother needs specialist care. There’s no happy ending on the horizon.
Known for energetically outraging and challenging his audiences, Noe’s changed direction, but it’s not a complete volt face. That ability to confront and challenge is still there. At no point does he ever attempt to sugar coat the agony on screen. It’s a slow, sombre and heart breaking situation, and one inspired by personal experience – the recent deaths of several close friends and his own brush with death in 2019 caused by a cerebral haemorrhage. The result is an ambitious film and a fine one, one that feels at times like watching the kind of reality TV you’d never see, nor want to. The camera follows the couple round their cluttered apartment, a home that’s become a prison, like the proverbial fly on the wall. But a split screen technique allows us to enter their individual worlds, see things through their eyes and watch them as they separately go about their days, from when she wakes up and clearly doesn’t know where she is to her wandering round the local shops with no idea where she is or why. Even when their paths cross, they’re each in both halves of the screen, still viewed by those separate cameras.
There’s documentary feel, presenting the truth in a searingly honest way, but with a compassion that breaks your heart as you watch, helpless in your seat. It means the actors are almost constantly in a searching spotlight, one that would detect any artifice or weakness. There’s none. Both Argento and Lebrun are excellent – Lebrun especially with her sad, bewildered eyes and huge weary sighs that increasingly become the replacement for a dwindling vocabulary. Argento, with his wheezing chest and loud, Italian temperament, constantly keeps his frustration and anger on a leash, trying his utmost not to take what she does personally. It’s nigh-on impossible and would take the patience of a saint. He’s not one.
Noe’s fans may be surprised by this turnabout of a film. Hopefully they’ll be impressed as well because, even though its running time means you’re in for the long haul, it works on multiple levels, emotionally shattering and truly astonishing. And once the credits have finished rolling, it’ll be a while before you move out of your seat. Or feel like speaking to anybody ……
★★★★★
Drama | Cert: 15 | UK cinemas from 13 May 2022 | Picturehouse Entertainment | Dir. Gaspar Noe | Dario Argento, Francoise Lebrun, Alex Lutz.
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