Gaspar Noë’s Vortex concerns an elderly couple who inhabit a well lived-in flat on the outer arrondissements of Paris; husband (Dario Argento) is writing a book on cinema and dreaming, cinema as dreaming, while the woman (Françoise Lebrun), once a psychiatrist, now struggles with dementia. In other words, Vortex is supposed to be a different sort of Noë film—tender, more accessible. Absent is Noë’s more usual archetypes of chemically altered youth and the bodily grotesque, which the filmmaker raises to the level of visual sublimity (Julia Ducournau’s Titane seems to have assumed this mantle for now). And yet Noë’s instinct for excavating the essential truth of human relations in scenes that are quite brutal to watch is very much at work.
Things appear, at first, fine. The woman wakes up as we hear a morning radio show play from somewhere in the flat: a panel of experts discussing the grieving process. A voice notes that Western society avoids the phenomena of aging and dying, relegating it to invisible spaces like hospitals and hospices. This the expert calls the medicalization of death. The man wakes up later and goes about his own routine. The film is structured by a split screen, each screen focused on each character, reinforcing the fact that these two live in parallel non-overlapping realities, despite sharing the same cramped domestic space. In his screen the man sits at his desk; he describes his book rather inarticulately to someone on the phone as about film as dreaming, huge sex, the oceanic. In her screen the woman takes out the trash and wanders, agitated and confused, around several stores.
The split screen works like a visual simile to compare and underscore the sad irony of what’s happening in both scenes: the woman as confined within an involuntary dream from which she can’t wake; the man confined by his own self-importance and thoroughly unoriginal ideas. The split screen also achieves different effects at different moments. The medium close-up, fairly tightly framed quality of each half as it follows man and woman lends a claustrophobic, almost subterranean sense to the flat’s interior. The doubled screen’s intermittent cuts to black feel like eyes closing and opening, as if we the viewer are coming in and out of consciousness, a technique Noë uses in Climax (2018) as well.
What emerges in the film as a recognizably Noë touch is a progressively threatening sense of tension. The woman no longer recognizes the man she is living with; the man is very weak from a stroke several years ago; both teeter on the edge between the unnarratable day-to-day and total disaster. That the infirmed and self-absorbed, walking stereotype of a cinephile is played by Dario Argento is a richly self-referential gesture. Not only is Noë poking fun at his own legacy, the arbitrary and malevolent forces of violence that populate Argento’s films are here turned inward as the very process of aging: the call is coming from inside the house.
Stéphan (Alex Lutz), the couple’s son, deals with the circumstances as best he can, but he has his own struggles. One of the most poignant uses of the split screen near the film’s end—Stéphan going about his daily life in one and his parents in the other—confronts us with an obvious fact, but one that we often forget in order to preserve our sanity—that people continue to live and exist in the world even after we physically leave them.
As the name of the metro station nearby their flat, Stalingrad, suggests, living is attrition. And while a brain hemorrhage that Noë experienced before pandemic gives helpful context to Vortex’s subject matter of aging and mortality, it’s important to note that the film doesn’t once reach for the sentimental or profound. Noë’s films often revolve around the cruelty people are capable of toward each other; Vortex is concerned with the cruelty of death as total erasure. The film ends with a montage that marks the passing of time, the apartment interior as it is dismantled and laid bare, then a swirling overhead drone shot of the building and its surroundings. Perhaps Noë would have liked to extend this sequence deep into the future, if he could: we’d see a revolving door of new inhabitants moving in, aging, dying—the building rebuilt, transformed, unrecognizable.