Enter Japan

Gaspar Noé's visually terrifying, frequently exasperating new film Enter the Void is many things. It is a trying, baldly shocking film that is the closest approximation to a nightmare I have ever seen in a movie theater. It is also a harrowing depiction of the cost of chemically-induced euphoria, of the ruin of ceding the body to goalless indirection. Looking past the LSD, the "Tibetan Book of the Dead," the menacing flirtations with incest and trauma, however, is also a tale of the experience of being a foreigner in Japan.

With its numerous lingering shots of an endless neon Tokyo, it seems hard to believe that the setting of this movie could ever be overlooked. Yet the light and noise of the Tokyo of Enter the Void is so overwhelming, so ubiquitous, that at some point in the roughly two-and-a-half hour extravaganza one indeed begins to lose sight of it. Perhaps this is due to the hypnotic, numbing effect of the camera's cyclical swinging shots, the narrative repetition, or the near-total lack of major Japanese characters.

Perhaps, as a viewer who is fond of Japan, the setting fades as a sort of defensive mechanism against the noxious, self-destructive behavior of the movie's Western protagonists, content as they are to let their Japanese friends read their pregnancy tests and have sex with them but never, you know, actually have meaningful conversation with them.

All throughout this film full of artful, balletic self-destruction, all I could think was: Who is the victim here? Who is to blame? Are these clueless white people viewing Japan as nothing more than their own hedonistic, neon-washed playground? Or are they being swallowed whole by a culture that is relentlessly homogeneous? (Japan is 98.5% Japanese). Where notions of ingroup and outgroup are embedded within the very language? Where the youth population is growing smaller, killing themselves in greater numbers, and increasingly retreating into online worlds?

Or is their self-destruction really no different than self-destruction anywhere else in the world?

Some have called this film "pure cinema," a "mash-up of the sacred, the profane, and the brain-dead." Indeed, its visual ingenuity and frequently disturbing aura lingers long after the film's ludicrous ending.

But all I could think about as I watched it was of being a foreigner in Japan.