Climax

Rating: 5/10 (21 October 2019)

Climax, to me can be defined by 30 or so minutes of ostentatious film making, with its long takes and its gogard-ian stylized texts,etc. Plus about 60 or so minutes of empty sensationalism.
One must wonder, how can Noe at the same time romanticize and aestheticize this semi bohemian, recreational drug taking lifestyle while being such a moralistic tool? ( all the adulterous people in his films end up being punished in one way or another, in his films drugs lead to alienation and death.) The only answer i can think of is this; Aestheticizing and problematizing and most importantly, making it seem counter cultural and dangerous to live such a lifestyle he essentially is making himself a martyr and a hero for despite of such dangers indulging himself in drugs and sex.
Despite all of that, the film is not a failure since all of its artifices work quite well.
The long introduction works as a premonitory character investigation and can give you early hints on where the movie is going. One weird thing worth pointing out however is the way the movie depicts black people. So early on we have a really long and uncomfortable scene where two black men discuss raping one of their colleagues. Not only that but later in the film in the lynching scene we see a white woman as innocent and fragile while black men and women ignorantly accuse her and literally ask her to kill herself. Not only that but the only one person who stands up for her is a white woman.
Quite alike to the first minutes of Irreversible, the last 20 or so minutes of Climax use some of the same camera effects to disorient to build suspense. All of that works really well, but like the rest of the film seem gratuitous. In love with nihilist catchphrases Noe almost at the end of the film says to us that Living is a collective impossibility. It might be so, but it seems like a bit of a exaggeration coming from a film that depicts a tragedy that could be so easily avoided. The sole fact that he had to go as far as digging some urban legend from 20 years ago just to make his audience feel like people are awful and untrustworthy makes me realize how much people are great and trustworthy. I don't think that living is a collective impossibility, i think that Noe's films try really hard to depict collective cases of bad faith.