Vortex

Vortex; drama / tragedy, France / Belgium / Monaco, 2021; D: Gaspar Noé, S: Dario Argento, Françoise Lebrun, Alex Lutz

An elderly couple in their 80s, living in a house in Paris, is having trouble. The wife wonders around the store and gets losr in the city, so the husband has to find her and return her back home. She suffers from memory loss, and takes medicine daily. Their son, Stephane, comes to visit them and recommends they move to a retirement home, but they don't want to hear about it. The wife takes the manuscipt of her husband, who was writing a book about movies and dreams, tears the papers and throws them into the toilet, angering her husband. One night, the husband has a stroke and falls on a floor. The wife finds him only in the morning, and contacts Stephane. The husband dies in the hospital. The wife wonders around the streets, aimlessly, until she commits suicide in her bed.

Gaspar Noe's least controversial film became also his most critically recognized one, since "Vortex" was hailed by critics, dedicating the story of a dying old couple to everyone who's "brains will dissolve before their heart", as the title puts it. Similarly like Haneke's "Amour", "Vortex" is a minimalistic, bleak and depressive depiction of old age as a trap from which there is no escape, and Noe actually cast Italian director Dario Argento in the lead. Except for the opening and the ending, 95% of the film is filmed in a split screen, one following the old woman, the other the old man, which features a few neat ideas that play with this concept (sometimes both of them in both screens; in one scene the camera shows her with her husband in the same frame on the one side, and her and Stephane in the other frame, featuring only a small camera tilt...). However, while this split-screen 'gimmick' is interesting in the first 30 minutes, once the viewers get use to it, "Vortex" turns out to be a very conventional story with banal dialogues, and with a running time of 140 minutes, it is definitely overstretched and needed to be cut by a third. The sequence where the husband walks across the house at night, has a heart attack and falls on the floor, convulsing in pain for a minute while his wife is asleep in the bedroom, is painful to watch and not for everyone's taste. The events of the husband coping with his wife suffering from dementia are rather stale, sterile and grey, and one wishes they were done with a broader spectrum of a viewring experience, featuring a more versatile writing. We get these realistic characters, but they don't grow on us, nor do they emotionally engage us as much as we wished for.

Grade:++