Dangerous Dances

A French dance troupe inadvertently takes LCD and horrific hijinks ensue in 2018's Climax. A loosely structured film that was largely improvised by mostly non-professional actors, I'd have thought it'd be fairly boring if someone had explained it to me before I watched it. It's actually not bad, mostly due to the choices made in terms of composition and subjects made by director Gaspar Noe and cinematographer Benoit Debie. I'm not sure it's good enough to justify the effort put into it but it's far from a disaster.

The film begins with interview style footage with the characters as they talk about themselves and the troupe. They're putting together a performance for a competition in the U.S. and each of them talks a little about the work they put into it and their hopes. The interview footage is shown on a television framed by stacks of books and DVDs.

This is the only part of the film I'd really call postmodern as it seems like the director informing us directly on all his influences going into the production. Certainly I didn't need him to tell me Suspiria was an influence--the dance troupe running around screaming in green, red, and yellow light would've been enough.

There's not really a plot. Following a successful rehearsal, the dancers start partying. They're drinking sangria, which looks nicely like blood, and slowly they become aware of being weirdly aggressive and horny. One dancer has a little boy whom she fearfully locks in the power room to protect him from everyone else but then she loses the key. You see her frantically running about looking for it as the camera follows other characters or occasionally stops to focus on her.

You get a nice sense of the party continuing its path to hell outside the camera frame. Sometimes Noe follows a character out of the dance hall back to the dorm rooms or the kitchen. Someone gets lit on fire and runs offscreen. Someone who thinks she might be pregnant tearfully confides in another dancer before being beaten up by a third who wanders in. Everyone has his or her own dramas about sex or relationships that get reduced to something primal under effects of the drugs.

In fact, before the drug took hold, mostly all any of them could talk about was sex. Who would they have sex with, would they consider fucking someone of the same sex, would they have an abortion, etc. And they generally seem a bit shallow, which makes them also seem more vulnerable. They don't have the mental tools to begin to grapple with their situation.

The only people in the film with acting experience are Sofia Boutella and Souhelia Yacoub. Boutella gives a certainly unrestrained performance, particularly in one scene where she screams and pushes her hands down her hose.

I found myself hungry for a little more substance in the material. As it is, it's kind of like watching an aquarium of humans. But I've seen worse movies. The only part of this one that really annoyed me was when the camera went upside down for a few minutes near the end. I guess Noe was going for disorientation but it was mostly just frustrating.

I thought it was a little sad they couldn't get the rights to real music and had to use generic dance beats for the whole film. But maybe that's just what this kind of dance music is supposed to sound like? I can't say I've been in any European dance clubs lately. Or ever.

Climax is available on Showtime.

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