MOVIES CLIMAX Starring Sofia Boutella. In French, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable
from previous page from Smith College. The latter appears to have majored in yoga, but there’s no mention of our protagonist’s specialty. It wasn’t cinema, because if she had seen Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, she’d have known to stay away from Isabelle Huppert— especially when classical music and broken glass are involved.
Huppert has been playing pretty twisted characters of late, as in Paul Verhoeven’s Elle and Haneke’s Happy End. This wasn’t lost on Irish writer-director Neil Jordan, far from his premillennial run of Mona Lisa, The Crying Game, and The End of the Affair. He and coscripter Ray Wright came up with a seemingly apt vehicle for the eerily ageless French star, as the titular Greta Hideg, a Parisian widow full of grace, charm, and something else.
When Frances finds the older woman’s handbag on a subway from Manhattan, and returns it, she discovers a homey, if somewhat strange, corner of Brooklyn (a nifty effect heightened by shooting some scenes in Ireland, and the urban stuff in Toronto—thereby necessitating the presence of Colm Feore in a small role). This enigmatic lady is impossibly cultured, and Frances has recently lost her mother. Consequently, she’s deaf to Erica’s warnings and doesn’t run back to the A train when Greta hits the ol’ upright. Liszt’s Liebestraum supplies a morbid motif, and the hint that the stylish Frenchwoman may not be what she seems. (Another hint: Hideg
means “cold” in Hungarian.) Seriously, don’t go into her basement!
I wouldn’t give too much away, but the filmmakers and the trailer do that for themselves. In fact, the movie’s biggest problem is that it pulls its switcheroo too soon, revealing Greta’s ill intentions just as the new relationship begins. Jordan gestures toward kinkier, or at least campier, fare. At one point, Greta d BOY, EVERYTHING’S coming says she’s caught in a “well of loneliness”, up Suspiria these days. First, we get referring to the 1928 novel the retina-scorching 4K restoration that set the tone for countless tragic of Dario Argento’s 1977 classic—with lesbian tales to follow. Alas, an colours so wild it feels intriguing art-house start yields to like your eyes are on acid—then tired horror-thriller tropes before Luca Guadagnino’s high-test remake, psychology even sets in. and now this. We can consider Ken Eisner Climax a cousin, given that an old VHS copy of Suspiria is conspicuously present in the 1996-set film’s opening scene, along with Andrzej Żuławski’s equally bonkers Possession and a few other culty titles used to curry the approval of writer-director Gaspar Noé’s intended audience.
In another callback to Argento’s film, Climax is about a group of dancers who find their way to hell not because they’ve landed in a nest of witches, but because somebody spiked a bowl of sangria with LSD. But let’s back up a bit: after a pre-credit sequence introducing us to a cast of uniformly detestable characters, all of them signalling the neurotic vulnerabilities the film will subsequently turn against them, Climax explodes into an enthralling five-minute dance sequence, captured in an uninterrupted take that bleeds into a postrehearsal party and the arrival of that fatal bowl of sangria.
Viewed from a distance, what we then see is another 90 minutes of spectacular choreography, or the viscerally physical staging of all the film’s ensuing worst-trip-ever psychodramas, acts of violence, and deaths. Noé’s camera swoops through the studio and around these contorted, self-punishing bodies with equivalent muscularity and delirium, often upside down, locked in a sick pas de deux with a nauseatingly overamped EDM soundtrack. Sound fun? I liked it, but then, as the great Chuck Barris once said, “I like morgues.”
As if it matters, among the ciphers employed here to flesh out Noé’s theatre of cruelty are a pregnant depressive, a soulless lesbian couple, two super horny and totally not gay black guys—and a child, also dosed, whose fate naturally inspires the most from Noé’s evil genius. But it doesn’t matter. Garbled message about the sanctity of life aside, I think (who knows?), this is the Irréversible filmmaker in his native territory, where unmatched technical daring is put to the service of a sensation-addicted 14-year-old boy’s gleefully X-rated imagination. Two thumbs up (your ass).
Adrian Mack