Lux Æterna

With Lux Æterna, it’s as if Argentine French filmmaker Gaspar Noe wanted to willfully be more experimental and playful (even his most playful is still brooding) and appears to have produced and directed this film while his creative momentum was on a streak. Arid, intense and chaotic, this behind-the-scenes film within a film is a more minor Noe film crafted right after the cult hit Climax and just before Vortex, which is one of his most artistically successful films to date. His latest film will certainly please most of the director’s fanbase and please other cult movie and experimental film aficionados. With a provocative Latin title that means eternal light, which is also the name of a Clint Mansell piece featured in Requiem for a Dream, it’s also a series of films and promotions for Saint Laurent’s fashion line. Noe carries his reputation for crafting formally daring films, and he continues to use striking imagery, use of split screen, flickering lights, and neon lights as Laurent funds these projects.

A 51-minute film that begins with two such films, Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922) and Carl Thedore Dreyer’s Days of Wrath (1943), of witches being persecuted and burned with captions. The film begins with art-house icons Beatrice Dalle (Trouble Every Day, The Intruder) and Charlotte Gainsbourg (Melancholia, I’m Not There) having an impromptu conversation about sex, career, and movies in which witches are burned. We eventually find out they are on set for a low-budget indie French film where Beatrice Dalle is in fact directing a film about witches being burned.

The film is certainly a companion piece to Climax, the 2018 French, acid trip horror film about a group of dancers who travel down an abyss of madness after they get high on a spiked fruit punch during a dance party. Exchanging dancers for filmmakers, the setting is a film set, and we see how Noe uses his techniques of split screen, long takes, tracking shots through hallways and dressing rooms, and neon lights to lead its meta characters into another abyss of insanity. Dalle ends up losing control of her film set, especially since the EP and cinematographer appear to be at odds with her vision. The whole set is a mess as the whole cast and crew have waited hours and hours and the first shot hasn’t been up yet. Dalle even refers to the cinematographer and producer as “Fagin and Scrooge”. Frequent Noe actor Karl Glusman (Love, Neon Demon) arrives on set and begins rudely pitching his script to Charlotte Gainsbourg and Abbey Lee (Neon Demon) to be in his directorial debut, which only aggravates Charlotte and Abbey more considering they are trying to prepare for their scene.

Abbey is also frustrated when she is informed that she has to be topless for the film, something that was told to her on the spot. Noe certainly examines the misogyny that exists in a mostly male dominated industry.  Interesting enough, Charlotte, Abbey, and another actress who plays the witches appear in sexy dresses, kinky boots, and shades. The flames behind them are not real, they are synthetic background flames that will be replaced by digital ones. As expected, Noe gets into commentary and philosophy on art, and his film certainly captures the chaos of a film set quite well. Even sometimes the split screen has overlapping dialogue deliberate heightens the set going berserk, which holds a Robert Altman quality.

At its core, Noe is certainly showing the chaos of filmmaking, and how sometimes chaos can help deliver the emotional truths the actors are set out to do, which is reaffirmed in the film’s astonishing finale and striking last image. Noe has made his career crafting shocking films that are distressing, shocking, and violent. He’s certainly one of the most gifted modern filmmakers because he is constantly pushing the realms of what cinema is capable of with tone, technique, and experience, a career and following that many filmmakers aspire to be. But Lux Æterna doesn’t feel any more deeply philosophical as his prior films, or as profound as his recent Vortex. Noe is most effective when he has a larger scope, and there is a lot of potential in Lux Æterna for Noe to dig deeper, especially with the finale that has a riveting feel, that has potential of diving even deeper.

Noe investigates a film set run by self-indulgent artists, misogynists, technicians, and other crew members attempting to advance in the industry, which may not sound new. We have encountered this satire before in such films as Truffaut’s Day for Night, Tom Dicillos’ Living in Oblivion, and Olivier Assayas’s Irma Vep, to name a few, and there is something of a Godardian essay in his approach. Clearly not as ambitious and rather more playful than his previous films, narratively it’s a bit unresolved. While it’s not Noe at his most fresh or deepest, he once again delivers a fascinating experience that will impress those searching for something less trifling.