The most shocking thing about Gaspar Noé’s new film is that it’s not out to shock. European cinema legends Dario Argento and Françoise Lebrun star as a middle-class couple. An academic (“Lui”/Him) and one-time psychiatrist (“Elle”/Her), live side by side but rarely connect. This is mostly, but not entirely, because she has dementia. There are references to infidelity, as well as shots of an excrement-smeared loo and a man getting high. Yet mostly what the characters do, as we watch them on a split screen, is potter. This twisted romance, from the man behind I Stand Alone and Irréversible, moves at the pace of an especially sleepy snail, which is all part of its beauty.
In the Parisian flat where the couple live, books rear up from the floor like stalagmites. The woman buzzes around the cluttered space, sometimes like a bewildered blue bottle fly, sometimes like a vengeful god. With the flick of a wrist, she transforms domestic objects into agents of destruction. The husband, who has heart problems, is writing a book about dreams and cinema and, from what we can tell, it’s wise-sounding waffle. The wife certainly isn’t impressed and what she does to the manuscript made me laugh out loud. That is, until the husband sees what she’s done and starts weeping like a baby.
