Ephemeral Sentimentality in Gaspar Noé’s Creative World

The article focuses on the imaginary, yet somewhat real world created by one of the most contradictory filmmakers of our time, Gaspar Noé. Noé is a French director of Argentinean origin, born in 1963. His works received both admiration and criticism over the past decades. He is criticized for the brutality of any episodes and motifs, yet adored by those who can appreciate the hidden sentimental overtone of his films. The emotional impact of his works is ephemeral and difficult to grasp at once, yet it lingers on. The initial episodes of the “Irreversible” can cause nausea, but the latter ones (edited in an inverted chronological sequence) possess an inevitable hint of vain hopes of happiness. Gaspar Noé labeled his next film, “Enter the Void,” a “psychedelic melodrama.”We traced this ephemeral sentimental mood from the earliest short “Carne” (1991) to the director’s releases of 2018–2019. All the forbidden topics (not so much forbidden in the contemporary cinema) appear in Gaspar Noé’s films: excessive violence depicted too realistically, drugs of various kinds, soft porn, even hardcore (in “Love”). One can see the incest taboo, regarded by anthropologists to be the core of culture, suspended here (not for the first time in the contemporary cinema as well). Nevertheless, the sentimental aura dissolves it all.The world of Gaspar Noé’s creative work is dangerous and unpredictable. You can take a wrong turn in the city, be raped and cruelly murdered. You can enter “The Void” (a bar named so) and be accidentally shot. And then you wonder if the Tibetan Book of Dead gives you a chance of return, in the womb of your own sister, as a child of your friend.A fantastic world, but much too keen to the real one. In a true fantasy, “Game of Thrones” for example, we find as much violence, rape, incest, burning a witch alive (compare the latest Noé’s production, Lux Aeterna). But you do not feel it. Fantasy is a safe medium of releasing our primitive fears and drives in a suspended mode: it never was so, the fake medieval world of George Martin does not exist. The world of Gaspar Noé exists, it is crammed into modern cities and waits around the corner.Here we need the aid of Lacanian psychoanalysis. To interpret the difference, one must take into account Jacques Lacan’s concept of “the Real”. If the Real (not the outer reality, but Real inside the human being) comes too close to us, we feel fear and anxiety. If the Real crosses the Imaginary (vain hopes for happiness, for example), such an intersection provokes hatred. If the Real crosses the Symbolic, it provokes a vigorous desire not to know. Those who blame Gaspar Noé feel this desire. Those who appreciate him try to encompass the polarity of abomination and sentimentalism in the real world.