The Hip Pocket #43: ENTER THE VOID

There is no single canon.

We all have movies we love.

Some of them are great movies. Some of them are terrible movies. Love does not care. Love is unreasonable. Love is blind. We love what we love, and the louder you love it, the better.

One of my favorite things is sharing a film I love with someone. Even if they don't love it the same way I do, that experience imparts something about you to that person. When you share something you love, you are sharing a part of yourself, and there is nothing more vulnerable or personal than that.

I don't think of these movies as the canon or the official library or anything that formal. These are all just movies I keep in my hip pocket, movies I've filed away as part of my own personal ongoing film festival as worthwhile and notable.

This is an ongoing list, one without an ending. This is The Hip Pocket.

Enter The Void
Paz de la Huerta, Nathaniel Brown, Cyril Roy, Olly Alexander, Masato Tanno, Ed Spear, Emily Alyn Lind, Jesse Kuhn, Nobu Imai, Sakiko Fukuhara, Janice Sicotte-Béliveau, Sarah Stockbridge, Stuart Miller, Emi Takeuchi, Rumiko Kisishima, Akira Kuzuki, Sayuki Nakamura, Kaori Nakamura, Naoko Hirosawa, Kenji Isomura, Akira, , Anna, Marie, Rico, Risa, Ryô, Yuri, Sandra, Milton James, Hideomi Nagahama, Takaharu Hachiya, Toshio Hanaoka, Kazuhiro Nakanishi, Adrien Ledanois, Keiji Suzuki, Simon Chamberland, Joan Heithfield, Kenneth Heathfield, Jessica De Marco, Lucas Sirois, Ewan Widgeinton, Alexandre Bergeron, Mackenzie Falcombridge, Gaspar Noé
cinematography by Benoît Debie
music by Thomas Bangalter
screenplay by Gaspar Noé
with the help of Lucile Hadzihalilovic
produced by Pierre Buffin, Brahim China, Olivier Delbosc, Vincent Maraval, and Marc Missonnier
directed by Gaspar Noé
Not Rated
2 hrs 41 mins

A young man is killed and his spirit goes through the process of becoming one with the infinite.

This movie has the most aggressive opening titles of anything I’ve ever seen, and that’s just a sneak preview of what Gaspar Noé has in store for you.

When this film was released, I picked it as my favorite of that year, and wrote about it a number of times. I’d send you links to that writing, but the Internet is increasingly transitive these days, with archives just vanishing because predatory venture capital fuckheads buy things and then destroy them. Suffice it to say I was wildly enthusiastic about the film and made that clear in a number of different articles. I had friends get genuinely angry with me about how much they hated the movie after they saw it based on my recommendation, and I get it. Gaspar Noé is a provocateur. He makes movies that are designed to be a poke in the eye, and I think the thing that would upset him most would be making something that everyone liked. I dislike several of his films. I don’t think he always gets it right. This one film, though, works for me in every way and is the one film of his that I have rewatched happily a number of times since it was first released.