The Critics

FILM

Better the devil you No

Who knew ghosts were so clever and organised? By Ryan Gilbey
Enter the Void (18) dir: Gaspar No One of these days, Gaspar No is going to make a perfectly quaint little romcom and the surprise will kill us all. Until then, he is set on a more conventionally shocking path, conducting experiments in sensory overload. Despite its unrelenting grimness, his 1998 debut, Seul contre tous, understood the tease of the tawdry as well as any Roger Corman B-movie. Before an outbreak of violence onscreen, a message in red letters flashed up, warning us that we had 20 seconds to leave the cinema. Clanging alarm bells made the coup de thtre complete. Nos new picture, Enter the Void, is another endurance test but for unusual reasons. Harder to bear than the gory violence and explicit sex, or the stroboscopic credits sequence designed to weed out any epileptics, is the irresolvable tension between the avant-garde provocateur No wants to be and the narrative traditionalist he really is. Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) and Linda (Paz de la Huerta) are orphaned siblings living in a neon-scarred, nocturnal Tokyo. Hes a drug dealer who isnt averse to getting high on his own supply; shes a stripper who doesnt stop being a commodity when she clocks off. Clearly, neither of them has addressed properly that tricky work-life balance. But at least Oscar has stayed true to his promise to Linda that he would never leave her. OK, so he encouraged her to come to Tokyo, introduced her to drugs and didnt do more than grumble when she fell in with some unsavoury types but lets not nit-pick. Hes such a devoted brother that even being shot and killed doesnt stop him from keeping an eye on her. As Oscars body lies curled and cold in a shower cubicle, his spirit drifts over Tokyo, waiting for the emergence of a new life through which he can return to earth. Its all laid out in the handbook otherwise known as The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a copy of which Oscar was consulting before his death, in the manner of a motorist logging on to Google Maps. His demise may have resulted from being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but, when hes in spirit form, his command of narrative priorities and his ability to be present for any
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encounter needed to further the plot suggest that hes also been swotting up on Robert McKees screenwriting manual, Story. Oscar witnesses the comeuppance of the friend who betrayed him and never misses an instalment of his sisters ongoing degradation. His tastes as a ghost run to the soapy: he drops in on Lindas lover just in time to find him having sex with another woman. And hes there to float through a brothel where the joyless grinding corroborates Nos view of humanity as a seething cesspit. Oscars knack for being in on every critical moment doesnt feel like omniscience so much as organisational excellence on his part. Enter the Void is shot with a subjective camera and No is even careful to replicate Oscars blinking (at least while hes alive ghosts dont have eyelids, silly). Only the flashback sequences, during which the camera is positioned behind Oscar, are exempt. These provide another example of the striking respect for narrative coherence that apparently comes with death. Oscar collates every piece of information necessary for us to assemble his complete backstory. If its a harrowing memory, such as his parents death, he helpfully replays it several times over. You can never see bodies crushed in a head-on collision too many times, thats what I say. Nos intention to make a 2001: a Space Odyssey for a new generation is advertised by his pictures cosmically inclined themes and some psychedelic special effects that run the gamut from A to LSD. An extended acid-trip sequence is pleasant enough, even if the same effect could be achieved by drinking too much cough syrup and staring at a lava lamp. But for all its visual eclecticism, Enter the Void has the profundity of a gap-year chinwag on a beach in Goa. Its view of life and death is so comforting and literal-minded, cinematically and philosophically, that its less a new 2001 and more like an art-house Ghost. l Ryan Gilbey blogs on film every Tuesday at: newstatesman.com/blogs/cultural-capital

TELEVISION

Imperial bedrooms
Rachel Cooke wonders why we need another drama about the Blair years
The Special Relationship BBC2 Whisper it softly, but I think I may be growing tired of the Peter Morgan/Michael Sheen roadshow. I loved The Deal, when Sheens uncanny and slightly camp impersonation of Tony Blair was still a novelty, and The Queen was bliss. But The Special Relationship (18 September, 9.30pm) felt somewhat ironically, given how often it mentioned Bill Clintons sui generis erection more than a little flaccid. The point it made that it was during the Kosovo crisis that Blair developed his taste for war, presumably because he thought it was a cast-iron guarantee of eternal superstardom was too laboured and the narrative lacked friction, which left it underpowered. In The Deal, the conflict was Blair v Brown; in The Queen, it was the old establishment v the new. Here, for all that the naughty Bill Clinton (Dennis Quaid) was not quite so keen on an invasion of Kosovo as Blair, the two leaders were essentially involved in a love-in. For Blair, this was a kind of foreplay, given his later relationship with George W Bush. As I watched, the suspicion grew that I was being dealt a form of high-class gossip. There were enjoyable moments. There was something creepily thrilling about appearing to see the Blairs or the Clintons, come to that in the privacy of their bedrooms, and one felt instinctively that some of Morgans guesswork as a writer was absolutely right. In an early scene, Cherie (Helen McCrory, again) compared the feeble support she received at No 10 to the gold-service White House team that surrounded Hillary Clinton (Hope Davis). Blair, who was in the bath, said: Would it help if I sent Jonathan [Powell, his chief of staff] out to buy a Filofax? Hee hee. Twelve years on, no wonder shes always flashing her chequebook at the man from Foxtons. I was convinced, too, by the bawdiness of Alastair Campbell (Mark Bazeley) after the Lewinsky scandal broke. Eatin aint cheatin! he announced charmingly, as he and Cherie discussed, in technical terms, what precisely counts as infidelity. But, for a film that wanted to deal with such huge events, there was something peculiarly telescoped about the production. Britain, according to this version of the tale, was run by just three men: Blair, Campbell and Powell

Lost in Tokyo: Linda (Paz de la Huerta)

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