Climax, by Gaspar Noé - feature film

With Climax director Gaspar Noé shows himself as so often averse to all film conventions. Not only does he open his film with the closing scene, but he also lets the credits roll across the screen. Only then does he venture to introduce the characters, all dancers, who are allowed to speak about their ambitions and talents straight into the camera. The dancers have come together for the dress rehearsal of a dance performance. And those dance sequences that follow are perhaps among

the best performances ever captured on film. In all their almost animalistic recklessness, the dancers seem almost demon-possessed. That says a lot about the improvisational skills of the extremely talented dancers, who are able to twist their arms and legs into all sorts of unnatural poses, almost as if they have completely turned their joints.

After all the physical efforts, there is a party with lots of drinking and bragging. The atmosphere is fairly relaxed, but under the influence of alcohol and even more so when the sangria is supplemented with lsd, the elation gets out of hand and a total derailment ensues.

In Climax the story is subordinated to the exuberant film style, as is actually the case in all of Gaspar Noé's films. The director's main goal is to carry his audience along in a maelstrom of hallucinatory images. The camerawork is a stunning feat of craftsmanship. While the main characters sink deeper and deeper into their trance, the camera spins, swings and flies right through all the rooms of the school building, past all the places where the dancers commit violence or have sex with each other. Even as a film-goer you run the risk of being seriously intoxicated by all those almost paranoid images. A film as a physical experience, of an intense, if at times uncomfortably poetic intensity.

This film can be attended with a day ticket or festival passe-partout, or with a film ticket, to be booked through the film agenda of LantarenVenster.