It’s logical that Gaspar Noé’s latest film be compared to Michael Haneke’s Amour. Both are about impending death. Both focus on elderly couples. Both are unflinching in their depiction of how the body deteriorates in real time. The main difference is that while Haneke addressed dementia to a certain extent, Noé goes all in, and perhaps this is the reason for the difference in tone. Per the title of his film, Haneke showed how love cannot conquer death, no matter how powerfully felt that love is. And while Noé opens his film with a dedication that seems to convey the same thing—”To all those whose brains will decompose before their hearts do”—the subsequent two hours and 25 minutes takes a very clinical look at this deterioration, so much so that Noé resorts to a continual split screen that follows the unnamed spouses, played by Françoise Lebrun and veteran Italian director Dario Argento, in parallel, as a means of showing how, at one point, they became separated first by the wife’s loss of cognitive function (the exact moment is graphically depicted by the screen dividing like a living cell) and second by the husband’s loss of any ability to consider his wife’s welfare. In that regard, Vortex is even a more appropriate title here than Amour was for Haneke’s situation: The pull of death is inevitable and inexorable. 

The split screen device is not a gimmick. Though it takes a while to get used to—the viewer isn’t sure on which side to fix their gaze—it renders the feeling of alienation and loneliness terrifyingly immediate. It also inflates the desperation that both spouses feel. The husband seems to be a film scholar or critic, and his office is a chaos of papers and books that, under normal circumstances, would simply indicate a cluttered life but here seems to register a cluttered mind, or, more precisely, a mind that can no longer sort things out. One of the more disturbing scenes shows the wife, who used to be a clinical psychiatrist, absent-mindedly tidying up this clutter and then rip and flush down the toilet the husband’s notes for a book he is writing. It’s perhaps already obvious from the husband’s own failing mental faculties that he will never finish this book, but his cries of despair when he realizes what she’s done are as heart-wrenching as any you would hear from a parent who loses a child. Speaking of which, the third wheel in the movie is their adult son (Alex Lutz), who fully understands what is happening to his parents but can do nothing meaningful about it, owing to both his father’s stubborn insistence that he can take care of things and the son’s own distractions with drug addiction (a state that may have been exacerbated by his close proximity to his mother’s prescription pad), divorce, and unemployment (he appears to be a film professional). Another particularly effective scene has the son trying to convince his father to enter himself and his mother into an assisted living facility while his own young son plays with toy cars in a childish, violent manner. The slamming sounds he makes visibly terrifies the wife, though her son and husband either don’t notice or don’t care. Similarly, there is a slight sub-plot concerning the husband’s one-sided pursuit of a younger female colleague that is not only unseemly in its revelation of a man who doesn’t seem to bother with what his wife thinks, but highly troubling in that his belief that this woman was at any time some sort of paramour appears to be a figment of his imagination.

If Noé’s ending isn’t as emotionally devastating as Haneke’s it’s because the love at the center of the latter’s movie makes itself felt with a rare intensity. Noé’s approach is more existential and, consequently, more frightening in a visceral sense. As in all his films he takes the natural development of his stories well beyond their limits in the most provocative manner possible, but since he’s talking here about death as something everyone will face, he doesn’t have to drive the idea home. All he has to do is show what happens to this particular couple, and it’s scary enough. I’d hate to refer to Haneke as sentimental, but compared to Vortex, Amour is practically a romantic comedy. 

In French. Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6359-8608), Shinjuku Cinema Qualite (03-3352-5645), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-546805551).

Vortex home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2021 Rectangle Productions – Goodfellas – Les Cinemas de la Zone – KNM – Artemis Productions – Srab Films – Les Films Velvet – Kallouche Cinema