Puneet Bansal
If you're like me, and pine for the dangerous, ridiculously ambitious and more than occasionally silly LSD mindfuck movies of the 1970s, the Argentine-born French director Gaspar Noé feels your pain -- and is here to fill up your synapses with brightly colored goo. Although he remains nearly invisible to Americans, Noé has carved out a career as a visionary and provocateur on the outermost edge of European cinema, making deliberate outrages like the reverse-chronology rape-revenge saga "Irreversible" and its even more misanthropic and violent predecessor, "I Stand Alone."
After many years of gestation and production, Noé is back with his first English-language film, "Enter the Void," and whether you like it or not, the dude has taken his game to the next level. This powerful, hallucinogenic journey will strike some viewers as a flat-out masterpiece and others as flatulent garbage. It actually has elements of both, so let me issue a completely weaselly, asterisk-laden recommendation: You have to see this! If (and only if) you're into this kind of thing!
Below, you can read what I wrote about "Enter the Void" after seeing Noé's 156-minute edit of the film at Sundance earlier this year. (I've made a few discreet edits.) He's cut almost 20 minutes out of it since then, and that's the version IFC is distributing to theaters and via VOD. I was delirious and underslept when I wrote this -- which was entirely appropriate, as would be other altered states of consciousness -- and somehow neglected to mention Noé's amazing opening-credit sequence, which got a roaring ovation from the Sundance audience and is worth seeing all by itself.
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