It has now been nearly a quarter of a century and six feature films that Gaspar Noé, the 58-year-old Franco-Argentine director, has taken on the cast-off of the naughty rascal in a French cinema that he drinks in his cosmic visions (Enter the Void2010) and his adolescent provocations (Alone against all, 1999; Irreversible, 2002). Vortexwhich chronicles the disintegration of an old couple whose wife is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, changes the situation, so much the formal adventure – a screen divided in two, where each spouse occupies his half of the frame – meets here a deep emotion, intimately linked to the cinematographic process (“Cinema is death at work”, said Cocteau).
The double screen process takes on its full meaning when one of the two characters leaves its frame and leaves nothing but emptiness…
The empty frame thing is exactly the feeling I had when my mother died. I didn’t expect it, it was the first time it had happened to me with someone so close. What we call mourning, for me, was that: the feeling that there was a hole in space. And this hole, you carry it with you for months. I could have filled this half of the image with another character, but I preferred not to do so, to keep this glaring lack.
We have the impression that “Vortex” marks a turning point in your filmography, with its more realistic approach.
This is perhaps the most down-to-earth film I have made. On the last line of the last page of the scenario, there was written: “This is a very banal story. » This experience of parental implosion and the disintegration of the home described in the film is something that strikes all families, in all countries of the world, all social classes. We are all programmed to lose our parents at one time or another.
When did the need to make this film go back?
What I needed was above all to pay my taxes late! At the end of 2019, I had a cerebral hemorrhage. I had to spend a whole year at home, that of confinement, watching films on Blu-ray and DVD. Well, I was the happiest of men, I felt like I was back in adolescence! But I had debts, and I had to shoot. Vincent Maraval and Edouard Weil [ses producteurs historiques] asked me if I had an idea for a film behind closed doors. It’s been a long time since I wanted to do one on elderly people who lose the use of language, at the same time as their grandson discovers it. It was the perfect opportunity.
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