I do like Gaspar Noé. I like the swirl of colors and violence and Thomas Bangalter (consensual) sex. I like the stupidity. I like the malevolence. I like when he reveals himself to be a huge softie who just can’t get there if he doesn’t act like a tough guy for the first 4/5ths of a movie. I like that he has a lot of thoughts about pubic hair.
But I didn’t have the highest of hopes for Climax, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival today. From its raised-eyebrow of a title to the smirk of a poster to the we’ve-been-here-before nature of its synopsis, it was striking me as less a logical continuation of wherever he’s been going than a dead end. But word has been pretty good, which makes this first teaser — a mix of music, overhead shots, eventual chaos, and sangria — more enticing.
Watch below:
In the mid 90’s, 20 urban dancers join together for a three-day rehearsal in a closed-down boarding school located at the heart of a forest to share one last dance. They then make one last party around a large sangria bowl. Quickly, the atmosphere becomes charged and a strange madness will seize them the whole night. If it seems obvious to them that they have been drugged, they neither know by who nor why. And it’s soon impossible for them to resist to their neurosises and psychoses, numbed by the hypnotic and the increasing electric rythm of the music… While some feel in paradise, most of them plunge into hell.
Climax is currently without US distribution but should receive notice out of Cannes.