Climax

Gaspar Noe is one of cinema’s great provocateurs. Experimental in form and in content, he delivers films that are unlike anything else – extreme and astounding and with strange moments of beauty bashing up against intense and disturbing material. And this is him delivering a short, sharp shock to the senses as he examines a dance troupe assembled in the French countryside whose meet-up party spirals out of control when the sangria is tainted by LSD. Noe does things that simply shouldn’t work – putting the credits in at a random point, shooting entire sequences from odd angles (there’s a dance sequence shot entirely from overhead that enthrals, and later another scene is shot upside down), with a mulit-racial, muitl-sexuality troupe of some 25-odd characters each with their own moods, opinions and agendas. It’s a letting go of all inhibitions yet despite that, it’s also a controlled, clever, emotional and intense masterwork – able to be at any moment joyous, horrific, romantic, brutal, political, abstract and precise. Absolutely worth indulging in.