Senile share – Newspaper Kommersant No. 196 (7397) dated 10/21/2022

A film by French provocateur Gaspard Noé Vortex was released, dedicated to an urgent problem – Alzheimer’s disease. Mikhail Trofimenkov tried to articulate why Noé’s cinema is dishonorable.

Noe works in the genre of “shock ordered?”. The difference between him and the real provocateurs – which was, say, Alexei Balabanov in Russia – is that his provocativeness is predictable, expected by an enlightened audience. Noe is sentenced by his very reputation to shoot sadistic episodes (Irreversible, 2002), pornographic (Love, 2015) or unsightly scenes of senile dementia. To shoot with a visible anguish, but, in the depths of the director’s soul, with an icy calculation. Never showing sympathy for unfortunate spouses (Dario Argento and Francoise Lebrun). For him, they are humanoid insects, on which – and on the nerves of the audience – Noe experiments.

Noe is also the director of one formal reception. Naked, clean or, if you like, dirty reception for the sake of reception. In “Irreversible” it was a reverse chronology: from a nightmarish denouement to the former happiness of the young spouses, destroyed by the sadistic play of fate. Even then, his formalism evoked a simple and unanswerable question: but, strictly speaking, why? And he provoked a ruthless and simple answer: to be interesting for the sake of it. If Noe had told the same story in the normal time sequence, the film would have been just banal.

In Whirlwind, the same bare trick is the use of a split screen: the screen is divided in half by a black line, like a mourning border. For example, in the left half of the frame He coughs in his sleep, and in the right half She relieves herself. Or, for example, on the left, She, stricken with dementia, wanders around the apartment, forgetting where she is, and on the right, He watches Dreyer’s classic “Vampire” (1932) on TV.

Suppose, at first, such a separation is a justified metaphor for the loss of any connection (except for the remnants of unbearable mutual tenderness in broken hearts) between spouses. But the problem is that Noe does not “pull out” the metaphoricalness that he himself has set to the end. In most episodes, the black vertical seems to be just a technical defect, dividing the whole frame: Noe is a hostage not only of reputation, but also of a strained reception. He seems to have challenged Michael Haneke’s great and terrible Love (2012) on almost the same sensitive subject. But, feeling his weakness in comparison with the harsh monumentality of his colleague, he replaced it with a formal twist.

The most interesting layer in Whirlwind is the criticism of the intellectual class. Spouses are “children” of the revolutionary 1960s. Their apartment, comfortably filled with books, is hung with recognizable posters of the turbulent years. “CRS / SS” – equating the French riot police with the SS. Poster “A woman is a woman” by Godard. A poster advocating women’s right to have an abortion.

She is a psychiatrist, in a daze treating her husband with a cocktail of who knows what pills. He is a film critic who has not completed a book on the connection between cinema and dreams. Their son Stefan (Alex Lutz): what a son. It seems to be an unemployed filmmaker, but in life a petty drug dealer. And the traditional French chatter about memory, the “work of mourning” and other freudy stuff is carried on the radio and on the TV screen.

Cruel, in many ways fair, but if Alzheimer’s is a metaphor for intellectual impotence, what does medical meticulousness have to do with it?

In general, “Whirlwind” only reminds the audience that “we will all be there.” Thank you, of course, but we somehow guessed about it ourselves.