Trepidation is not the ideal frame of mind in which to approach a film, but after I Stand Alone and Irreversible, the French enfant terrible Gaspar Noé merits nothing less and nothing else, this time offering up a spoken synopsis of The Tibetan Book of the Dead during the descent of a multi-story stairway, and an interminable illustration of the synopsis through the eyes, or the consciousness, of a slain American drug dealer in Tokyo. By the end, the initial trepidation has long since given place to exasperation, not an ideal frame of mind, either, but somehow more comfortable, more settled. Much could be said about the phantasmagoric, virtuosic visuals, so much in fact that we might forget to say, might be distracted from saying, the obvious and the essential: that The Tibetan Book of the Dead could just as well have been illustrated through the experience of a Buddhist nun, a dedicated veterinarian, or a Chilean miner, and that the filmmaker’s preference for lurid sex-and-drug banalities exposes him, for all his “experimentalism,” as a run-of-the-mill sleazeball. With Nathaniel Brown, Paz de la Huerta, Cyril Roy, and Masato Tanno. (2010) — Duncan Shepherd
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