Have you ever been staggeringly drunk at a house party that was so noisy you thought you might throw up, and so out of control someone was literally peeing on the floor? Have you ever descended, like Dante, to the very centre of Hell? If you’ve never done either and are wondering what it might be like, Gaspar Noé’s newest should set you crooked.
First, a word on the title. Noé’s last film, 2015’s Love, was two-and-a-quarter hours that had critics pondering the line between art and pornography, and whether he’d blurred it, erased it, crossed it or strangled his audience with it. So it should be stressed that Climax does not contain an onscreen climax, in either the sexual or narrative sense.
It opens with documentary-style footage of a bunch of French dancers discussing their craft. We get to watch it on an old-style TV screen, flanked left and right by the kind of books and VHS tapes that a certain kind of poseur would have purposefully stocked his shelves with in university in the early 1980s; Kafka, Nietzche, Wilde, Bunuel and a well-worn copy of Suspiria.
Noé, who graduated from Louis Lumière College in Paris in the early 1980s, then presents the dancers performing in a 10-minute single-take shot that is the highlight of the film, the camera swooping up over their heads and back to the floor as they writhe and shimmy. And then they break apart into little groups to drink and smoke and discuss their sex lives. Climax is set in 1996, which means no one is texting. For this alone, I award one star.
