Skip to main content

"Lvx Æterna" dir. by Gaspar Noé


"Lvx Æterna"

Where I watched it: Blu-ray

Gaspar Noé has been a huge inspiration to me ever since I saw Enter The Void, a film that I still consider one of my all time favorites. His movies are rollercoaster rides through the scariest of territories. In Enter the Void we got "Death: the ride." In Climax we got "Drug Overdose: the ride." And now we have "Being a woman in film: the ride."

Always a misery trip but always profoundly eye-opening.

A lot of Gaspar's work tends to be anxiety inducing and leaves the viewer in a state of discomfort while watching... but by its nature leaves the audience pondering and ruminating on its content for quite some time afterwards.

While I watched "Lvx Æterna" (Eternal Light) I experienced those familiar Gaspar Noé vibes: dread, anxiety and ultimately... hopelessness.

"Lvx Æterna" follows Charlotte Gainsbourg (playing herself) as she prepares to film a scene in a movie where she plays a witch that is burned at the stake. It follows her journey from the green room to the set and while this may not seem like content worthy of making a whole film about, it showcases how women are treated and handled on set. It's disturbing. It's deeply distressing.

To make matters more chaotic, the film is mostly shown in split screen, sometimes having actors speaking in English on one screen and in French on the other. At one point in the movie, an Australian actress says, "I can't f***ing understand anything these people are saying to me!" as her frustrations about being shoved from one holding spot to the next by film crew becomes increasingly overwhelming for her.

Béatrice Dalle gives an amazing performance (apparently a lot of it was improvised). Charlotte Gainsbourg does great too. Everyone delivers, even when they are designed to be unlikeable.

If you have an aversion to strobe lights you might have to be careful going into this. It's definitely the most intense strobing I've ever seen. It's by design that it actually physically hurts to keep your eyes open. It's absolutely genius in my opinion.

The film is a snippet of a chaotic day on set but its allegory is much larger than it appears. The witch hunt symbolizes the century old mis-trust that men have of women, especially women that demonstrate power of any sort. Sexocide is what they refer to it as. And unlike witches, it's a very real thing.

This film might be hard to get your hands on, it was originally screened at film festivals in 2019 but has not been released on streaming platforms or physical mediums until just now and I had to get a limited run copy from Vinegar Syndrome online.

But if you do end up seeing it, I think you'll be glad you did. Maybe that won't click while you're watching it, but it definitely will later.

Also... it's only 50 mins long.

Another victory for Gaspar. I'm terrified to experience the dementia ride with "Vortex."

9/10

"Thank God I'm an Atheist."
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"The Cursed" dir. by Sean Ellis

"The Cursed" Random pick from Amazon Prime, this actually turned out to be a pretty amazing film. "The Cursed" is a gothic horror set in the late 1800s. After slaughtering and stealing land from a Roma clan, a curse is unleashed on the family and village responsible for the aforementioned atrocities. This film is another one that I'd recommend knowing as little about as possible. It's no secret that this film taps into the werewolf lore that most are familiar with, however it takes some completely new approaches and pushes some serious boundaries in terms of violence and gore. Outside of Boyd Holbrook's awful British accent there wasn't much to not like about this film. It's shot gorgeously and the pacing is somewhere between slow and medium at first but ramps up quite a bit in the last third. 8/10
Post a Comment
Read more

"Mutant" dir. by John "Bud" Cardos

"Mutant" Forget every vibe you get from the title and poster, this is a zombie movie. "Mutant" is the story of two city bois who go to a small country town to relax and party hard. Nearing the small town they are driven off the road by the local yokels and are forced to hitchhike the rest of the journey with a weird man named Mel who claims that there are aliens visiting the town. Mel is straight up lying to the two city slickers as he damn well knows that he's the root of the problem as he's been experimenting on the townsfolk by slathering them in toxic waste. The end result of Mel's sloppy experimentations is that the town turns into zombies and yep the city bois gotta stay alive long enough for the movie to end. For some reason this movie has a cult following and I'm not sure why. It's got horrible production value, the acting is along the lines of those Italian cannibal movies I just watched and the story is weak even for a zombie movie. Wha...
Post a Comment
Read more

"The River Wild" dir. by Curtis Hanson

"The River Wild" Where I streamed it: "The Hollywood Suite" via Prime. "The River Wild" is about a family that gets stuck on a raft with a couple of bank robbers. Not only is this movie made by the director of 8 Mile but it also has an all-star cast of 90s Meryl Streep, 90s Kevin Bacon, 90s John C. Reilly, the kid from Jurassic Park and the most forgettable face in cinema, David Starthairn. The film takes a while to get going but once it does... IT'S PURE TENSION AND EXHILARATING WHITE WATER RAFTING UNDER EXTREME DURESS. However, it is not without flaws. There's some pretty stupid stuff going on here. For example (mild spoilers... doesn't really matter): David Strathairn's character is able to sprint non-stop over 2 mountains, then make his way down the river to get ahead of the boat that initially left him behind in the river and still have time to set up the most elaborately underwhelming booby trap ever. Not only is this unhumanly possib...
Post a Comment
Read more