SAD FADE AWAY

Rachael Davis speaks with director Gaspar Noe about his latest film Vortex, dedicated ‘to all those whose brains will decompose before their hearts’

Anyone who has watched a loved one suffer with dementia will know just how agonising and heartbreaking it can be. It causes memory loss, slows down thought processes, impairs understanding, judgment, language and mood, and can lead to people losing interest in hobbies, relationships and daily activities.

Eight years ago, film director Gaspar Noe’s mother had dementia before she died. This experience of seeing the woman who had cared for and protected him throughout his life become the person who needed protection from her new, bewildered experience of the world is what inspired his latest film, Vortex: a raw, honest and complex look at the impact dementia has on a family.

The 58-year-old Argentine filmmaker, now based in Paris, has a back catalogue rich with horrors, psychological thrillers and psychological dramas. He is no stranger to tackling disturbing subjects and evoking strong emotional reactions in his audiences.

“I’ve already made films that scared people, turned them on, or made them laugh. This time I wanted to make a film that made them cry as hard as I could cry, in life as at the cinema,” Noe says of his latest film. “Vortex is really inspired by recent experiences in my life, and all those ultra-brilliant loved ones whose powers of thought I saw decay and then die before my eyes.”

Noe dedicates Vortex “to all those whose brains will decompose before their hearts”, and the film follows an unnamed elderly couple, played by Francoise Lebrun and Dario Argento, as The Mother rapidly descends into the grips of dementia while The Father battles a heart condition. Their son, Stephane, played by Alex Lutz, is a recovering addict who does his best to help while trying to cope with his own personal problems and care for his young son. Lebrun says one of the first people to watch the film actually asked Noe if she really had dementia, such is the effectiveness of the way she makes her eyes glaze with confusion, how she puffs breath between her lips in lieu of the language she has lost, and the misguided determination with which she performs futile tasks.

Imminent death creeps after the characters as they try to maintain a semblance of normal life amid the tragedy of illness. Prescription drugs litter the cramped Paris apartment, worsened by the fact that The Mother is a retired psychiatrist who continues to write out prescriptions which keep her household stocked up, as Stephane hands out clean needles to the city’s users, in constant danger of relapsing himself.

Stylistically, Vortex is more reminiscent of a documentary than a drama. The film is largely improvised, as Noe gave his actors less than 20 pages of script. He did not employ

any make-up artists or hair stylists, relied on natural lighting, and filmed with two cameras before assembling the film in a split-screen format.

This is not Noe’s first venture with a splitscreen. His 2019 film Lux Aterna was largely edited with two or three screens, but he felt that in this project he could use the format in “a more emotional way, because the two characters are kind of disconnected from each other”. The split screen, Noe says, emphasises the shared loneliness of the couple.

“Even when they’re sitting side by side they’re usually shown in separate frames,

separated by a thin black border emblematic of the psychological rift between them. Mostly one side is following one character, The Father, and the other side The Mother, sometimes they move to the other side of the frame, but during the whole movie they’re in separate bubbles under the same roof,” he says.

Noe harnessed the constraints of Covid restrictions to cloak his film in claustrophobia:

the small cast and minimal filming locations were a direct result of working around the constraints of the pandemic. It can be debated whether Vortex presents an optimistic or pessimistic portrayal of the fragility of memory and vulnerability of life. Indeed, the one-line synopsis that Noe provided for his film is the most apt summary: “Life is a short

party that will soon be forgotten.”

Vortex, filmed with a small cast constrained by pandemic restrictions, is a raw and honest look at how dementia affects a family.