That's Entertainment!

I saw the worst film I've seen for a long time last week. Written and directed by Frenchman Gaspar Noé, it's called 'Enter the Void'. I suppose the blurb about the film should have warned me, at least of something: "A post-mortem hallucination likely to induce seizures even in the non-epileptic". The film is shot almost entirely from the point of view of someone who has been shot dead (which doesn't sound too outlandish, on the face of it), and what attracted me to it was the phrase in the blurb about it "floating through the neon miasma of Tokyo like a woozy ghost." That's the bit that should have set an alarm bell ringing, I suppose.

Because, apart from the first hour of the film when the action is actually happening, that's about all we get - we are forcibly floated through a 'neon miasma' of hallucinogenic special effects, stomach-churning camera-rolling, repeated split-second flashbacks of horrific scenes, but little more. Sure, the film was pretty enough to look at, and possibly if I'd been watching it under the influence of some mind-bending narcotic I would have found it even prettier to watch, but there was scene after scene after scene where the director simply failed to move the story (such as it was) forward. I began to get fidgety after about an hour-and-a-half when I started to suspect that the scene I was watching was just another regurgitation of a scene I'd been watching a few moments before. Then another, and another, and yet another. True, each scene was shot slightly differently, and each may even have contained different characters, but the uneasy truth was dawning on me that basically, there was nothing new happening. This was either a display of lazy editing, or an act of gross self-indulgence on behalf of the director. I suspect it was both, but more strongly the latter. Gaspar Noé simply didn't seem to know when enough was enough. There were many, many points when he could easily have ended it, but no - he laboriously chugged on with more and more psychedelic images (some containing the most gratuitous and pointless sex I have ever seen), none of which did anything to develop the story. After one hour and fifty-five minutes, and when I gradually remembered that I had a life to be getting on with, I walked out. There was still another twenty minutes of this rubbish yet to run, but I urgently had some paint to watch dry. Not recommended.

On another evening this week, I went to watch a fairly reasonable stage performance of Shakespeare's 'Much Ado About Nothing'. This was a mainly amateur production at Nottingham's Arts Theatre, and although some of it showed the cracks between the professional curtain and some of the performances were a bit flaky, the company made a rather good stab at presenting the light and bubbling froth that this play is mainly about. After the dire and spirit-draining experience of watching Noé's film, this light satire on the tribulations of false wooing and social bungling, was the just the tonic. I also saw Billy Ivory's 'Made in Dagenham' in the same week - something else which is billed as having the 'feel-good' factor. It has some cleverly and sensitively scripted moments true enough, but the 'touch' of the whole film is depressingly stereotypical of many British 'underdog' comedies which - despite Billy's often strong and witty script - the director turns into a cliché. Worth seeing though.