LUX ÆTERNA is Noé’s take on the art and strain of filmmaking
Written and Directed by Gaspar Noé
Starring Béatrice Dalle and Charlotte Gainsbourg
Unrated
Runtime: 51 minutes
Opens in New York May 6, Los Angeles May 13 and national rollout after
by Clayton Hayes, Staff Writer
This was, I must admit, my first experience with the work of Gaspar Noé. He’s a filmmaker I’ve certainly been aware of for quite a while, and it isn’t as though I’ve been avoiding him, but I somehow have let his work pass me by. I’m not sure if someone more familiar with Noé would recommend Lux Æterna as a starting point, but I found it to be intriguing enough that I’m now curious about his earlier work.
It would be an oversimplification to say that Lux Æterna is just another in the long tradition of films about filmmaking, though that is certainly what it depicts. Leads Béatrice Dalle and Charlotte Gainsbourg play fictionalized versions of themselves working on the set of a film about witches called God’s Craft. Dalle is the director and Gainsbourg is the lead actor. Or at least, that is what the audience is left to infer; all we have to go on are bits of dialogue between Dalle and Gainsbourg and the torturous filming of a burning-at-the-stake scene towards the end of Lux Æterna.
The film seems to be quite interested at the outset with witchcraft, and begins with excerpts of torture from some very witchy classics in Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vredens dag (aka Day of Wrath in English and Dies irae in French). In a particularly interesting bit of coincidence, Noé’s most recent film (the recently-released Vortex) stars Italian director Dario Argento, whose 1977 film Suspiria kick-started my interest in films about witches. Aside from drawing a comparison between the torture depicted on screen and the actual experiences of women in filmmaking, though, Lux Æterna features very little in the way of actual witch content.
Noé seems much more interested in paying homage to directors and films of the past while examining the act of filmmaking itself. Aside from the footage mentioned above, as the film proper continues, it is intercut with quotes, primarily about filmmaking, from directors Dreyer, Jean-Luc Godard, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Luis Buñel. The thrust of the quotes seem to be that the sanctity of film as an art form is paramount, and the director must take control and make the film his own! And I do mean “his” here, as I think Noé is purposeful in referencing only male directors.
These quotes are juxtaposed against what the audience is shown on screen, a film shoot in utter chaos. The producers are spying on Dalle in the hopes that they find grounds to fire her. Friends of friends are wandering onto set and bothering the performers. The DP, who has been promised the role of director after Dalle is fired, seems to be in open revolt and refuses to listen to anything Dalle says. Every single member of the cast and crew, aside from perhaps Dalle and Gainsbourg, are trying to seize control of literally anything they can.
There is definitely a critique of the general lack of respect show to women in film, most clearly represented by the film’s final sequence: the set’s lighting goes haywire and strobes in red, blue, and green as Gainsbourg, tied by the wrist to a stake, begs for help. The DP, who had earlier bragged about working with Godard, refuses to stop filming and instead continues to yell directions at Gainsbourg.
There is, to me, another message: the quotes (and indeed the idea of auteurship) represent an unrealistic or overly-romanticized vision of filmmaking. The vast majority of films are, like the fictional God’s Craft, works of groups of individuals who have their own wants, their own cares and goals. Sometimes (often?) those goals are at odds with each other but, as Dalle says early on in the film, it’s worth it in the end if the film ends up being good.
There are definitely some things I’m still not quite grasping. There’s a lot about the effects of strobing light, including a warning at the film’s outset closely followed by a Dostoyevsky quote about epilepsy. It’s a very dense film at times, both in visual presentation and in dialogue. It frequently presents competing images in split screen, each focused on different characters and presenting different (subtitled) dialogue. Even with some earlier scenes to introduce the visual language to the audience I found it hard to keep up. And then of course there’s the strobing lights at the end which I found quite difficult to watch. All in all, it’s an interesting (and worthwhile) examination of auteurship that works well as a mid-length film.