MovieChat Forums > Enter the Void (2010) Discussion > Could this movie have worked if it was 9...

Could this movie have worked if it was 90 minutes and...

posted 9 years ago by grimesplaya
6 replies | jump to latest

...all of the most crushingly sad and disturbing scenes were edited out? I feel like the visual style is so refreshing and interesting and beautiful, and many of the themes of trauma and the central idea of literally seeing through the eyes of a guy's last moments alive and the process of him dying is fascinating...but could this movie have still worked without so much of the depressing and disturbing mements, like the idea of making Oscar someone in an incestuous relationship with his sister (why was a 2011 movie trying to tap into the current lexicon exploring themes that would be most relevant to comment on during or about...the middle ages? Who is this movie for?), the lingering shots on dead fetuses and continuous creepy voyeuristic lingering shots of sex (the idea of spying on someone having sex as a disembodied spirit is entertaining and realistic and human, but *beep* does the protagonist in this movie have some hang-ups hahaha), the second time the car crash was shown (and wasn't there a third?), and the overall tone of the bleakest hopelessness. If Oscar's problems began and ended at being a drug dealer and petty criminal, would the central ideas about death and reincarnation be any less interesting? And a movie exploring such challenging, hard-to-watch subject matter running at nearly three hours? HAHAHA. It's like the entire point of this movie was to invent the most original, appealing visual style in cinema in decades and make it as difficult to endure as possible lol. Am I missing the point?

[–] zerosum-1 9 years ago

Maybe you should try watching on psychedelics and report back to this thread when done.

[–] grimesplaya 9 years ago

bwahahahaha

[–] dumuzi23 9 years ago

Yes it still would have been a visually impressive movie, maybe even a bigger commercial success, but for me it wouldn't have worked nearly as well. I really liked that it was so drawn out and at times repetitious (car crash), because the movie was attempting to show the viewer the experience the protagonist was having and this kind of experience naturally wouldn't be as clean cut and straight forward as most movies are.

I don't really get what you mean about the themes being more relevant to the middle ages. I thought it had a very freudian, and therefore modern, tone.

[–] grimesplaya 9 years ago

lol, modern freudian tone. Alright then.

I guess I just feel like choosing that particular kind of person as a protagonist was a waste. I've met people like him IRL - pervert, sex offender, junkie, loser, burnout, etc - and I wouldn't want to spend more than ten minutes of my time with them, much less a three hour psychedelic trip into a first-person perspective of their life and afterlife. As a protagonist, he was definitely unique, but not particularly interesting or complex. Just a perverted, sick, lost kid with a serious oedipus complex. I guess incest was a common-enough social problem in the 2008-2010 cultural lexicon that was worth commenting on via a 2hr45min film? Whatever. The movie would've been something special if it focused more on the spiritual/psychadelic/visionary qualities and chose a more redeemable kind of protagonist with a more interesting and less gross and depressing POV.

[–] dumuzi23 9 years ago

Yeah, the protagonist was definitely not very likable or even interesting, but still I could identify with him on some level. Maybe that's why it worked for me.

I also didn't get the feeling that the movie was trying to comment on the theme of incest. While there was definitely a weird level of intimacy between the two, it was never made clear that there was anything going on. I thought it was just about the concept of an "unhealthy degree of attachment", it could have just as well been about the death/dying experience of a loving mother that can't leave behind her child. For a buddhist it's clear that too much attachment of any kind is unhealthy in the end. But because in the western mind this kind of attachment is often idealized it had to be about a kind of relationship that made the viewer uncomfortable to drive home the point, that what the protagonist should be doing, is to just let go of it and move on.

The movie would've been something special if it focused more on the spiritual/psychadelic/visionary qualities and chose a more redeemable kind of protagonist with a more interesting and less gross and depressing POV.

I thought as a depiction of a traumatic end to a life defined by trauma it worked perfectly well. Are you saying you would have liked a more uplifting and hopeful story better? I guess I could imagine to like such a film too, but I wouldn't expect something like that coming from Gaspar Noé. I assume you don't know his other works, right? Otherwise I don't understand how you could be surprised by the depressing feeling of the film.

[–] niteowljr 9 years ago

Personally I think it was too short. Another few hours of the wreck scene and maybe a couple more pointless sex scenes, all lit by strobes of course, would've elevated this tripe to ultra-tripe. This is what happens when you give someone a camera and convince them they're an artist.