Lux Æterna 2020

A very typical Noe film. His films are always pretty extreme but this time it genuinely wants to be as unwatchable as possible. It took me a little bit to get into this. At 49 minutes, it's visually painful but also an oddly hypnotizing experience about the thrill and stress of filmmaking. I can’t imagine watching this in a theater. It starts with a calm note and the situation becomes increasingly chaotic as the film goes. The split screen feels gimmicky at first but it's where the stress builds as you don't know what to pay attention to. This is one that's going to stay with me.

[Filmin] Possibly the film in which Gaspar Noé most clearly shows his concept of cinema. The shooting is hell, even more than the staging. The need to challenge the comfort of the viewer (in the images and in the narration) is again present, in the different points of view. His vision surrounds the campaign of a fashion brand with mystery, which continues with the short film "Summer of '21" (2020), starring Charlotte Rampling. Only a director like Gaspar Noé can turn witches into Yves Saint Laurent models. "Sexocide: the genocide of the witches".

In all fairness to my dislike for Gaspard Noé, I probably liked this one because I misunderstood it.

The ineffable Béatrice Dalle plays the director of a film about witches starring Charlotte Gainsbourg. The first act of Lux Æterna is a dialog between these Queens where they discuss witch moments in the past that affected them. That's when I understood Noé is telling us modern day actresses are treated now like witches were historically.

I won't go into spoilers but I will say there's a male DOP at the end of both this film and and the film in the film who would've fit in well with the inquisition. (Is this character meant to represent Noé? Could it be a confession of his own misogyny?)

If the film really is what I understood it to be, then it's an excellent condemnation of the treatment of women in the film industry. If I got all this wrong, then Lux Æterna is just another shiny bauble in Noé's bag of tricks.

Split-screen medium-length feature that culminates with three witches burnt at a stake made of epileptic lights. Despite my retina getting close to exploding, I doubt the last fifteen minutes were supposed to have a meaning that goes beyond a mere cinematic experience. The rest of the movie is essentially a metacommentary on sexism on set and perhaps the role of the director in a movie, complemented with quotes and old film footage as you would expect in a Facebook post. The initial conversation between the two leads was quite entertaining, but it’s once the chaos breaks out on set that the real fun starts. Nothing that new if you've already seen "Climax". It was rather stressful to watch, but I have a feeling it’s going to stick in my mind for a while.

A short film exploring gender politics from the perspective of a film set. It's claustrophobic, stifling, neurotic, and deafening. Definitely a must see, especially given it's runtime. Not as focused as Gaspar's other works but it works regardless.