Ever since watching Babel, I have been of the opinion that the gaudy Tokyo nightscape would make for a brilliant backdrop to some very whacked-out movie or other. As a result, either Gaspar Noé or I should be unnerved by that fact that the controversial director seems to have had much the same idea. In this seemingly unending work, he tells a squalid tale of sex, drugs, and grieving from the first-person perspective of its dead protagonist – a young American named Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) who has been paying for his increasing drug addiction with some small-time dealing in the clubs and bars of Tokyo. With no effort being made to disguise the plot, the audience is treated early on to Oscar’s friend Alex (a one-to-watch in Cyril Roy) providing an overview of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Before we know it, Oscar has met with his sudden and dramatic end in a filthy barroom toilet and the audience is invited to spend the next two hours in the bardo with their rather gormless protagonist.
In essence, the bardo is a transitional state between one incarnation and the next. Hence, Oscar’s spirit remains on Earth and is able to relive seminal moments from his former life and to observe what happens next to the people that he knew, as he waits and waits and waits some more in this incorporeal limbo. If this sounds a little tame, then that is to do the film a disservice, as several of the scenes are decidedly and provocatively discomfiting. In certain instances, Oscar flits in some psychosexual manner from the sight of his sister’s or lover’s breast to that of his mother when he was an infant. Elsewhere, he witnesses his sister Lisa (a once more rarely-clothed Paz de la Huerta) in highly personal moments – one of which is particularly unpleasant – or returns to a deeply traumatic time when they were both still quite young. However, as his time spent hovering over events past and present drags on, the sense is that Oscar and, by extension, the audience are helpless to do anything other than wait for events outside of their control to take their course.
Of course, another possible interpretation of this film is to see it as an intense visual dream. Many of the experiences that Oscar experience would have already been firmly implanted in his subconscious memory, e.g. the appalling experience of how his parents died, being jealousy of his sister’s lover, having been reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the fluorescent mock-up of Tokyo in Alex’s apartment, or once being told by Alex that his favourite experience was the time when he was sucking on his mother’s teat. In one instance, Lisa refers to having nightmarish dreams about Oscar. In another, she mentally and physically dismisses his cremated ashes as not being her brother. Are these jokey little hints and, if so, having been brought through a lengthy sequence early on where Oscar imagines that he is seeing willowy tendrils and vivid fractals bursting forth from the ceiling of his appartment, does the audience ever leave Oscar’s psychedelic-addled brain as he sprawls back on that untidy bed? One thing for sure is that the action only takes place at night – a time when the dead walk and the living sleep!
In one amusing irony, the film begins with the strobe-filled end credits being played at breakneck speed only for the actual work to turn out to be hugely drawn-out and repetitive. On the one hand, it would make for an interesting sensory experiment to watch this cross between Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Atom Egoyan’s Exotica whilst properly jacked up. On the other hand, having nothing more stimulating than caffeine in the system does turn the work’s impressive initial intrigue into a leaden and despairing affair by the end. Yet, even then, there remains something remarkably beguiling about the cinematography of Benoît Debie as the camera incessantly hovers, swoops, and soars in ghost-like manner around a seedy and vividly photographed Tokyo. When coupled to some stunning visual effects and an impressive soundscape, Mr. Noé’s audacious film makes for an undoubtedly intense and unique cinematic experience. Unfortunately, though, the overall work cannot match these aspects of it and the mind ends up doing some wandering of its own.
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