The filmmaker of works as sulphurous as “Irreversible”, “Seul contre tous” or “Love” abandons provocation in favor of a humanity without artifice to tell the degeneration of a retired couple, embodied with genius by Dario Argento and Francoise Lebrun.
“To all those whose brains will decay before their hearts.” It is through this dedication, both terrible and poignant, that Gaspar Noé sucks us into this vortex, this hollow whirlpool which will have only one outcome: degeneration and death. After having shown, in extenso, Françoise Hardy singing, in a 1965 archive, “We are very little, my friend the rose told me this morning”, the filmmaker reveals his two faded flowers to us.
She is Françoise Lebrun, mythical actress of “The mother and the whore” by Jean Eustache, here moving in the role of a retired psychoanalyst soon struck by Alzheimer’s disease. He is a voluble and unfaithful film theorist, wading through the muddled writing of an essay on the links between dreams and films, interpreted with incredible accuracy by director Dario Argento, known for his horrific masterpieces. (“Suspiria” or “The chills of anguish”).
On the terrace of their labyrinthine Parisian apartment, saturated with books, paintings, memories, the elderly couple share an aperitif in a calm, gentle, serene atmosphere. The next two and a half hours will be much less so, dissecting in an implacable, frontal way, but without sadism, the slow march towards death of a man with a fragile heart and his wife with a shattered brain. Opposite them, a son, played by Alex Lutz, watches helplessly as his parents disintegrate while he himself struggles to keep his own life as a former junkie in order.
>> To see, the trailer of the film:
death at work
In itself, what “Vortex” shows, as terrible as it is, is nothing original and might join the countless films exploring the ravages of Alzheimer’s (“The Father” by Florian Zeller, “Amour” by Michael Haneke ). However, no other feature film has ever seemed to us so fair, so powerful, so empathetic on the subject, drawing all the singularity of its gaze from its very form.
Entirely composed of split-screen, i.e. a screen divided in two, each part respectively following the man and the woman of the central couple, “Vortex” permanently inscribes this break, this visual separation which, far from being a stylistic affectation , underlines the isolation, the loneliness of the characters in the face of death and disappearance.
And if the question of death at work was already embedded in certain previous films by Gaspar Noé, the filmmaker had never allowed himself to go so much towards the intimacy of an emotion, to put himself so much at the heart of his work, whether through the canvases painted by his own father that appear on the walls of the protagonists’ apartment, the obvious rhymes between the character played by Dario Argento and Noah himself, up to the inscription of his date of birth at the very end of “Vortex”. At this stage, it is worth recalling that Gaspar Noé, victim of a cerebral hemorrhage in 2019, narrowly escaped death and that his latest film abandons any hint of provocation in favor of sincerity and an exposure that we did not suspect in the filmmaker.
A dream within a dream
Quoting frankly Edgar Allan Poe and his famous “All that we see or believe is but a dream within a dream”, “Vortex” thus oscillates between ruthless realism and dream, or nightmare, awake. Gaspar Noé succeeds in a great, humble and refined film that touches and moves with its sense of paradox. A film of funereal beauty, falsely nihilistic, which never forgets that, before the inevitable falls, it is the movement of life that must be filmed.
In the interior and exterior whirlwind that agitates “Vortex”, what remains following the disappearance is the affection and the closeness with which Gaspar Noé observed his characters, it is the tenuous and magnificent quivering of the slightest gestures of tenderness. , furtive caresses, embraces shared by the aging couple. “We are very little”, claims the rose, but if “Vortex” turns out to be so striking, it is because Noé celebrates this “little” like the whole, like the admittedly absurd, but precious vanity of our brief human existences.
Rafael Wolf/ld
