Vortex

             
Gaspar Noe's Vortex takes place largely in the apartment of an elderly couple in Paris. The couple are named Lui and Elle and are played by cinema icons Dario Argento (Suspiria) and Francoise Lebrun (The Mother and the Whore). The film is largely concerned with Elle's descent into senile dementia and Lui's frustrated and futile attempts to deal with the situation.

Throughout the film, Noe uses a split screen to present both partner's experiences as they navigate their day. Counterintuitively, this links rather than separates the duo in our mind's eye. We are always being reminded of their interdependence even when they are seperated. This is driven home in an early sequence when Elle leaves their flat and gets lost amidst the myriad notions and gimcracks of a store, spurring Lui to find her and return her to the flat. 

Once his character has been introduced, one of the split screens occasionally follows the exploits of Elle's ne'er do well son, Stephane. In any case, the placid objective gaze of the camera in Vortex remains the same. This is not a realism concocted to pull, subjectively, the lapels of the viewer into an empathic embrace of the characters, as in The Whale. This realism is more akin to the tableaux of Warhol or Akerman. Realism that dares to border on banality in order to invoke real time. 

Like those two titans, Noe has his feet in both pop art and the avant-garde. He utilized the split screen in his previous feature, Lux Aeterna. Both films feature actors playing variations of their persona. This and the usage of the split screen jibes nicely with Noe's theme, taken from Poe and mentioned thrice, that life is a "...dream within a dream." Noe knows that the sprawling detritus of a Parisian apartment or the labyrinth of shelves in a store is enough visual input to let the viewer know all one needs to know about an individual's journey : one of the dreams that populate our collective dream. No directoral sleight of hand is needed.

Vortex is the best memento mori film since The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and equally uningratiating. This is not a film for those who crave long plot arcs or double crosses. Film buffs will grok the Dryer and Godard references (and more), but Vortex's minimal arthouse theatrical opening in America was, especially for a 142 minut film, appropriate. I was especially moved by the film's coda. The couple have both gone to their reward and all we have before us are static shots of the empty apartment as it is being stripped of the couple's belongings. These remnants are all that remain of the departed,  they also have been players in the spectacle we have just witnessed and they are taking a curtain call at the end of the performance. I recall when my son was a tot and he would say goodbye, before we left on holiday, to our house's individual rooms and implements: "Goodbye bedroom, goodbye chair, goodbye potty", etc.