Cannes: This Is the Only Thing Gaspar Noé Fears About Death (original) (raw)
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The Projectionist
The provocative director returns to the film festival with “Vortex,” a meditation on old age. Some are calling it his “Amour,” though Noé begs to differ.
Gaspar Noé in 2019. He’s at Cannes with a last-minute addition, “Vortex.”Credit...Julien Mignot for The New York Times
July 16, 2021
CANNES, France — Gaspar Noé is a Cannes Film Festival fixture, but this year, he’s arriving just under the wire: After the director shot his new film “Vortex” in April and May under a cloud of secrecy, he rushed to complete it in time for a festival premiere. On Friday night, the last regular day of the festival, the film finally debuted; Noé had finished it just days before.
Maybe it’s fitting that “Vortex” arrived at the end of the festival, since Noé is chronicling what happens at the tail end of our lives. In split screen, the film follows an elderly married couple as they muddle around their cluttered Paris apartment. One camera follows the wife (Françoise Lebrun), stricken with dementia, as she struggles to make sense of her surroundings; the other follows her husband (the film director Dario Argento) as he deals with her condition and places calls to his mistress.
Though Noé has sent a jolt through past festivals with provocative projects like “Irreversible,” “Climax,” and the pornographic 3-D film “Love,” his new film exudes a different, more contemplative vibe. When we spoke earlier this week, Noé said that change in attitude happened after major events in his own life. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation:
When did the idea of old age and death start to feel more real to you?
There are shifting points in your life. My mother died in my arms, and when that happens, your perception of what’s real changes a bit. I also had a sudden brain hemorrhage a year and a half ago and I almost died of it. They said, “There is a 10 percent chance you will survive without brain damage.” Miraculously, I did.
When you get close to those situations — a car crash, a disease or whatever — the problem is not if you should have an afterlife, which of course I don’t believe in. The problem is what all the people around you are going to do with your stuff, with your books, with the bills you didn’t pay? My main concern when I was on that hospital bed was, “If I die, no one’s going to be able to manage all the books I have on the shelves.” The mess that you carry with you is the thing that keeps you alive.
What was your first experience with an older person who was losing their mental faculties?
When I was 8 or 9 years old, I met a friend who had a senile grandmother in his house. I would come and talk to the grandma and she says, “Who are you? You’re not my grandson.” I remember giving different answers to the same question, because as a kid, you can have fun with it. When it’s your own mother or father who starts losing his mind, it’s much more traumatic.
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A scene from “Vortex,” about an elderly couple facing the end of life.Credit...Gaspar Noe
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