Gaspar Noah magnificently films the last days of an old couple in his Paris apartment, with Françoise Lebrun and Dario Argento.
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At the opening of Vortex, from Gaspar Noé, something tells us that the experience will be unique. That this sixth feature film will not be a new hallucinated history, trademark of the author of Love, Climax, or Lux æterna, but a more intimate story. The excess of the credits (from the beginning of film), as well as its unprecedented concept – associating the name of the actors in their year of birth – put us on the trail of a fiction registered in the history of cinema. The cast is evocative: bringing together Françoise Lebrun, the mythical actress of the mother and the whore (1973), Jean Eustache, Dario Argento, the filmmaker and Italian master of the terror, as well as the humorist and director Alex Lutz , Gaspar Noé connects different “families” – art and test, gender film, the general public – and sign a generational work. While the Generic, again, makes the Cult song of Françoise Hardy, my friend La Rose (1964), on the wispling wagon, composed at the time of the vinyls, the viewer therefore learns that Françoise Lebrun was born in 1944. – It will soon be 78 years old, or 78 turns, to resume the names of the old phonographic records; Dario Argento was born in 1940, and Alex Lutz in 1978 (44 years old and, in a year, 45 rounds).
In Paris, in the Stalingrad district, a man (Dario Argento) and a woman (Françoise Lebrun) form an old couple (they do not have any names). They live in an apartment under the roofs, low ceiling and in-shaped important details, announcing a labyrinthine stroll. They are smiling, each of a window. The plan after, they drink a drink on their small terrace. “Life is a dream,” she says. This aperitif in the open air will be one of the few moments of serenity. Because the lady with a bun, brilliant intellectual, former psychiatrist, is losing the head – Alzheimer, even if the disease is not named. And life becomes a hell for her husband, cinema critic, which, on his side, temptly tries to write a try.
These first plans, in square format, will also be the only ones where Dario Argento and Françoise Lebrun appear together on the screen. All the rest of the film is turned according to Split Screen technique – the split screen in two. Each in his “corridor”, the two characters will therefore evolve in their own universe: the spectator acquires a “double vision”, enters the concerns of one and the other, becomes familiar with his habits. The mental space connects to that of the apartment, raising essential questions: What does live together, and what is dumping?
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