Enter the Void

Gaspar Noé's Enter the Void opened in competition at Cannes 2009 — Noé's first feature in seven years, after Irreversible — and is widely placed among the most formally radical European art-cinema works of its decade. The film runs 161 minutes; it has no conventional dialogue scenes for stretches at a time and operates almost entirely from a single first-person perspective.

Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), a young American drug dealer in neon-soaked Tokyo, is shot in a club bathroom in the opening sequence. The remainder of the film follows what happens next from a sustained first-person perspective that floats above the action — a subjective camera that drifts through Tokyo, through walls, through memory, through the lives of those Oscar leaves behind. Paz de la Huerta plays his sister Linda, a stripper in the same neighbourhood; Cyril Roy plays his friend Alex; Olly Alexander, in an early role, appears in supporting capacity.

The film's structural conceit is loosely modelled on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which Oscar is shown reading in flashback. Benoît Debie's photography, the digital-effects work that produces the floating-through-walls sequences, and the long sustained Tokyo neon-cinematography (Kabukichō, the love-hotel district) combine into a register that has shaped a generation of European art cinema. The film divided critics on first release; it is now widely placed among the most distinctive achievements in 21st-century European arthouse formalism.