Climax
Rip to this cast they would’ve loved Eusexua. Sirat/Climax circles of hell double feature when?
Love that Gaspar Noé went to a ball and said I NEED to queen out with them. He’s so real for that. And of course the french queer dancers matched his freak. Lightning in a bottle kind of film that I catch myself thinking about regularly. The entire cast is genuinely so fucking talented.
There’s a tremendous amount of respect and adoration for ball culture and krumping here. Primarily because Noé allows these artists to craft the film with him. This is their film, their dance. It’s a defiant and joyous and cathartic merging of two art form until it’s very much not. But even after the sangria (which, the constant hammy insistence on showing sangria cups and talking about the sangria is camp I’m sorry), that dance continues. It becomes a literal dance of death that’s tragic and horrifying and completely unexpected to everyone but the viewer. Because sometimes death and tragedy are random with seemingly no explanation except a simple fuck up. And what are we to do with that rage and frustration and hopelessness. Sirat and Climax suggest we allow it to move through us and move with it.
Noé’s part in this exuviation is notably subdued. He’s a voyeur in this space and a potential imp, casting horrors upon these dancers to see what they do. Blinking edits, fly on the wall composition, tracking shots that hover with omniscience, a predator looking for prey, make the audience that same voyeur and imp. The only ones that know the horrors that are about to unfold. Gaspar makes us (and himself) sadists. We invaded and poisoned that space. For me, there’s a distinctly queer element to this voyeurism, and thereby Gaspar’s and the audience’s role in this mess. Queer spaces like this are joyous, safe, expressive. The presence of a stranger or voyeur in this space, or any queer or marginalized space, can be exciting, we were all new at one point or another, but strangers bring a specific anxiety with them. Is this visitor going to join the dance, or are they merely here to spike the sangria and watch everything unravel?
Simultaneously gorgeous filmmaking evil evil we’re literally recreating hell filmmaking. That all red sequence… my god