“Did the audience know what to expect?” (NOPE!) VORTEX. When one goes to see a film by Gaspar Noé, you never know what you’re going to get. Sex, violence, or... an elderly couple dealing with the travails of growing older? Let’s just say that most of the audience was not prepared for what they were about to see as could be surmised from the one by one walkouts (a majority of the audience stayed, but the walkouts became like a sort of musical and light pattern - would this filmmaker have appreciated that? Maybe.), or the assbags checking their phones to see how long was left - again, a minority of the audience (I personally don’t have a greater pet peeve in the world - and this is the reason why I refuse to go to the cinema with most people - you’ve been warned... unless you are one of my inner circle, and even then, perhaps not ). This film was a more quiet affair than the filmmaker’s usual fare which I think perturbed a lot of the audience who is used to his extremism and came for it - but it doesn’t mean that there wasn’t stress, emotional extremism, and a crashing wave of pain and sadness. The direction and cinematography were glorious, the acting superb (the casting was brilliant), and the film, though different, as stated before, packed a similar visceral wallop - by the end the audience felt like they didn’t know what to do, and the sustained silence (it felt like nobody knew how to breathe) during the climactic scenes were as unnerving as anything this filmmaker has created.
New York Film Festival 2021 Night 3 (for me... you get it):
Updated: Jul 25, 2022