Gaspar Noe’s new dementia film is designed to make viewers cry
Rachael Davis speaks with the director about his latest film Vortex, dedicated to sufferers
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, 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 Noé’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, France, has a back catalogue rich with body horrors, psychological thrillers and 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 that 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 like pacing a nearby shop or flushing her husband’s newly written book manuscript down the toilet believing she was simply tidying up.
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.