I feel the same.
I really appreciate Gaspar Noe as a filmmaker, I don't know if I would say love, but I like his aesthetic. He's self-indulgent as *beep*, but it has worked in the past. His other films have elicited raw emotion in me, from sadness, to happiness, to anger, to disgust, to hopeless depression. etc.
The first half was strong. The pain was effective, even if the 'YOU'RE A PIECE OF *beep* hallway argument reminded me a lot of the 'go kill yourself' sequence in Enter The Void, it still worked. It showed traumatic love can be when someone totally breaks your heart. It was unflinching and uncompromising and I really loved that.
Then it keeps going, and Noe seems to do everything in his power to make the ""protagonist"" one of the most miserable and unsympathetic characters I've ever seen. I could not have cared for him less, I wanted all the women in his life to pick up and run. But Noe does this weird thing where it seems we are supposed to be caring for him, while completely destroying the female characters credibility. It was irritating.
Plus his tendency for self-indulgence was ridiculous this time around, almost to the point of parody. Then the sex gets repetitive, and dull, and the film becomes monotonous, and I found myself getting more and more angry and then just not caring.
I'll look forward to whatever Noe does next, but this is probably his first legit misfire in my opinion.
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