Feeling comfortable? Just say yes to Gaspar Noe

WHEN you feel complacent, whack on a Gaspar Noe film. His grating opening credit sequences will jolt you into your seat.

Enter the Void

WHEN you feel complacent, whack on a Gaspar Noe film. At the very least, his grating opening credit sequences will jolt you into the back of your seat.

And his latest is actually rather brilliant. I'll never forget my first Noe experience -- the bracing travails of a French butcher in I Stand Alone (Seul contre tous). It was at a film festival; Noe's films remain, unerringly, film festival fare.

I wonder whether the provocateur will ever nail a truly compelling film. At present, films such as Irreversible and his latest, Enter The Void (R18+, Paramount, 137 min, $34.99), offer glimpses of a talented artist who still prefers throwing little fits of mischief to narrative rigour.

His penchant for almost transgressive imagery of rape, incest and death is part child willing to raise hell and part artist trying to say something. If only it was always clear what.

Enter The Void reminded me markedly of Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, at the very least in its trippy design and intriguing questions about perception. Noe's sometimes loosely connected visuals seem to do little more than present a heightened view of life's travails.

Malick at least had something to say, or perhaps ponder, in his meanderings (although I've been amused by the divide in responses to that film - anyone under 35 or without kids detests it).

I struggled to find any meaning from Noe's film yet, as a cinematic viewing exercise, it is often captivating. But the cinematic tricks - flighty, soaring camerawork and stunningly integrated and invented computer animation - in Noe's movie careen well ahead of any sense as we follow drug dealer Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) drifting through Tokyo.

Don't look for a narrative as such; rather, see it as a hallucinogenic meander from Oscar's point of view and then from an other-worldy, perhaps spiritual, viewpoint. It is off-putting initially before offering something quite novel.

The acting lets the film down badly and the dialogue is undergraduate stuff; The Tibetan Book of the Dead is discussed, for Buddha's sake.

Irreversible was a better film but you can't say Enter The Void isn't diverting.

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