“Vortex‎” Review: An Elderly Couple Goes To The Dead Days

“Vortex‎” is a drama directed by Gaspar Noé, and the film is both good and offensive in ways that make it a bit impossible to see straight. It’s like everyone is looking out of a Draperian coffin, through a small window into a more cramped life, filled on both sides with books, clutter, goods, people and memories, leaving only a very narrow passage that you can only walk through sideways and slowly. Those parts that are off-topic can also be roughly summarized.

‘Vortex’ seems to have reined in the cruelty a bit, but really it’s just gone from a scream to a disembodied whimper, a frightened gulp, and a hopeless march to silence.

The film follows an elderly couple as they slowly fade away. The husband, Lui, is a film scholar; the wife, Elle, is a neurologist.

They lived a privileged life, living in a large house filled with all kinds of books and a small open-air terrace filled with flowers and plants planted by both of them, but unfortunately their wife suffered from Alzheimer’s disease.

Faced with the mental deterioration of their elderly wife and her increasing loss of speech, the life they had taken for granted was about to disintegrate ….

The film uses a split-screen approach to present the elderly couple’s fading appearance in parallel, capturing the real and moving traces of life through an almost documentary style, showing how Alzheimer’s disease destroys the lives of the elderly step by step.

The only combined screen in the film is the balcony garden at the beginning, after which the split screens are richly and appropriately used – splitting opposites, perspective shifting, matching, dislocation, etc..

Whether the characters occupy half of each side or the last half of the screen half black screen, is a huge sense of loneliness. In fact, the screen has not split before the very first two people are also standing against the window, each by the frame bundle.

The film creates a sense of fragmentation through the split screen, which is successful from the point of view of unifying form and content.

The images on the left and right sides of the film, one moving and one still, are of even density and match each other, with a very natural shift in perspective.

This formal innovation shows more visually the estrangement of the couple suffering from illness, and shows a broader “world”, thus using “estrangement” to strengthen the “intimacy” of the couple. “The world in the eyes of two people is the complete world, and the departure of one person means the feeling is halved.

The film has an extremely romantic beginning and then moves step by step towards suffocation. Even so, he finds her in the mini-mart, while anxious, but still buys her a bunch of roses that she likes in front of her eyes. After being counted by him, she takes a deep sniff of the roses, and then stuffs the whole bunch into the flower pot on the terrace.

The bouquet representing sweet hope, buried in the wrong way into the soil, will eventually fall…

The end of the group of photos, from a room full of signs of life, to empty, the room is still the same room, facing the two windows no longer have them looking at each other and smiling, what a powerless vortex.

The whole story of the film itself is like the title, gradually let people fall into disintegration, the film is a dream, the film is like a nightmare that can not wake up.

The blandness of old age is like a black hole that swallows up the good memories of the past, illness and stubbornness, drugs and resistance, and the despair of dying without the phrase “let’s pretend nothing happened and go on living”.

The last three minutes is simply a horror movie, people are gone, think about the end of life is not also, people are gone is nothing.

It is a very difficult viewing experience, a confused, meaningless feeling, and you can feel the director deliberately bringing this sense of helplessness to every viewer. Death is no longer sadness or fear, it is a murky whirlpool of water that cannot be flushed down the toilet.

The two main actors are very documentary performance, watching the time like a needle, but after a lot of energy, want to cry. And long and irritating is not life, the black line in the middle of the screen is like an impenetrable gap, the good life with aging falling apart.

Life is like a movie, life is like a dream.