Rock on

Rating: 9/10 (26 March 2019)

The woman will die from hypothermia if no one on a snowmobile passes by soon. She needs a St. Bernard, stat; and make sure that dog has a barrel filled with a good stiff brandy. Is she a dancer who got left behind at some bus pit stop? No. At the derelict old building that houses the dance repertoire, every performer is accounted for. The contemporary dance routine, fully staffed, goes off without a hitch. The choreographer seems pleased. So who is she then, this dislocated female in distress, screaming for help? The woman sees imported from another genre, a survival film; a plan crash survivor who went rogue from "Alive" in search of another diegesis, a parallel oasis with food and water. "Climax" isn't a survival film, is it? She's not the dancer who came in from the cold; she has no affiliation with this makeshift school for the performing arts. Right? "Climax" is not your father's "Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo". Form-wise, because of the disparateness between the opening scene and the first interior shot, the film could be construed as having the potentiality of being "Blazing Saddles" in slow-motion, but instead of a western, it's an adventure film that finds itself on a collision course with the musical. The woman's survival is of no consequence. The filmmaker forgets about her. If you forget about her, too, filmmaker Gaspar Noe will be pleased. "Climax" is a meta-commentary on American film. Noe's latest provocation, with its long uninterrupted takes is the antithesis of "Flashdance", whose editing style, informed and inspired by MTV, gave audiences short memories and made it harder for people to follow multiple narratives. The woman outside is an inconvenience. The woman's storyline; her progress towards the sanctuary of that derelict old building, gets discarded. She's a red herring. "To dance right through your life," to pursue your dreams of dancing on Broadway, "what a feeling" that must be when you're young and your whole life is ahead of you. "Climax" never leaves the warehouse. No cutaways to feet in decline, dragging across the snow; feet do what do best, keep the dancer, vertical. It's the final rehearsal, a graduation day without the pomp and ceremony of a gown and cap. The French dance company is taking their show overseas where the lights are brighter and the stakes are higher. Clapping Americans are the most important clappers. The dancers know this. A little fame may be in store for them. But "Climax" gets off on the wrong foot, so to speak. Get rescued or die. That is not a pertinent question. Peel away the same old rags to riches storyline that's been told since a young hayseed with stars in his eyes said: "Hey, my uncle has a barn. Let's put on a show." More or less, "Climax" is Busby Berkeley's "Babes in Arms", set to Daft Punk and Aphex Twin.
Dance or die? It's not the question the choreographer asks, but it might as well be. "What would you do without dance in your life," is the actual question posed to a candidate. "Suicide," the female dancer answers to the off-camera voice, Lou(Soufelia Yahoub), the aforementioned choreographer, captured for posterity on VHS tape, during the sit-down part of the audition. Hyperbolic, a little, this patented response, meant to impress the interviewer, but not by much. When the talking head is finally attached the body in perpetual motion, Selva(Sofia Boutella) dances as if her life depended on it. It's the same psychical surgery for the others, as well. Do these young people have a contingency plan should their dreams not go according to their liking? Probably not. They are living in the moment, sweaty day to sweaty day, and party all night, every night. The goal is to be seen by the right people who can propel them from obscurity to stardom. The lights in their rehearsal space doesn't have a lot of wattage. Only the lights in their eyes are bright. The people who populate "Climax" are living in an Irene Cara fever dream. So which one is Cara's alter-ego Coco? They're all Coco; both the girls and the boys want to be the confident young woman with talent to burn, who sang, "I'm going to live forever," in the 1980 Alan Parker film. "Fame" is fleeting, however, and so is life itself. What will Coco do if her embryonic career as a popular singer doesn't pan out? Alex(Jennifer Beals), the flash dancer, has a trade to fall back on. "What a feeling," it must be to know that you can weld. Soldering copper pipes can wait. Hard hat, blow torch, lunch pail, thermos; the accoutrements of a blue-collar worker can stay where it is, untouched, posing for a still life. It's New York or bust; it's time to get out of Pittsburgh. But in Coco's case, Parker suggests, fame may potentially be of the infamous kind. People won't remember her name; they'll remember her alias' name, if even that. At the performance arts high school, Coco has friends and associates. Doris, Ralph and Leroy are her friends, but her collaborator, Bruno Martelli(Lee Curreri) is her associate. Bruno, the portrait of an iconoclast as a young man, arrives at the performing arts school with his synthesizers; his futurist mindset, an affront to establishment types such as Professor Shorofsky(Albert Hague), a proponent of baroque instruments. The proto-EDM artist, in some respects, can be characterized as a forerunner to Daddy(Kiddy Smile), the commonwealth dancers' deejay. Both are part of the vanguard, revolutionaries who make traditional musical outfits ranging from orchestras to four-piece bands obsolete. But whereas Daddy can be a band, who not only spins and manipulates vinyl records, and most importantly, ingratiates himself within the collective whole, as when he leaves his exalted perch behind the turntable to bust a few moves of his own, crossing the boundary between master and servant; Bruno, conversely, likes the concentrated ascendancy that comes with rewriting the rules in his own image, telling Shorofsky: "Who needs an orchestrar? You can do it all with a keyboard, an amp, and enough power," as a member of the new order. He doesn't need sheet music of the old masters. He doesn't need a conductor. He broke the baton in two. The sheet music is in tatters; the old masters are granules of putrescent dust in a coffin. He writes the songs, alone. Fast-forward to 1996. Oh, no, the DJ is on acid. Somebody spiked the sangria. Daddy lost control. The techno music playing over the PA system has no oversight. The Prodigy has unchecked power.
No one from this group would be caught dead with a Rolling Stones album. The woman in the snow; the woman who is "Out Here On My Own" crashes the mis-en-scene with her survival narrative in tow, turning "Climax" into a survival film, after all, a tragi-comic Mel Brooks mash-up. Instead of two soundstages, it's the settings of the single interior and single exterior that converge. The woman who came in from the cold transfixed the cocktails with acid. Unbeknownst to Psyche(Thea Carla Schott), she tracked down her Berlin roommate. The woman in the snow is named, we surmise, is "Angie", like the song, a rock song, an outlier on the EDM-heavy soundtrack. In Pablo Pier Passolini's "Salo", the Ennio Morricone score competes with the Frederick Chopin piano pieces that the fascists use as an anesthetizing backdrop for the base and amoral tales they unspool to their young prisoners. Bruno, in a sense, avenges these fascists, theoretically, when he enacts a hegemonic shift from classical to popular. The idealism of a new music language, however, over time, can curdle into demagoguery. Bruno won the fight, the usurpation is complete, the old masters has lost its relevancy, but EDM, the end-result of the young American's pioneering work, turns into music of the ruling class. Angie, in a fight for rock's proletarian soul, co-opts electronica, the music of debauchery; the music of the people that Passolini condemned. She's no fascist; she's an Englishman in drag. Mick Jagger fighting Keith Flynt, or rather, an imitation of Flynt, alive in the grooves of a record that the deejay spins on his turntable.
Angie goes through Cara's inferno and comes out the other side, and lives to fight another day, undoing the damage that new traditionalists like Bruno had unleased on the world. Rock music is no longer at the center of youth culture.
To rock, is to be a revolutionary.