Gaspar Noé brings his cauterisingly fierce gaze to the spectacle of old age: the world of those about to enter the void. He brings to it a particular structural insight which I don’t think I have ever seen represented so clearly. Dying is bifurcated: a real-time split-screen experience divided between the carer and the cared-for. An old married couple, people who have had a lifetime to wonder which of them will die first and which of them will have to take up the burden of care, find that it is not so clear during the terrible endgame itself.
Veteran director Dario Argento and actor, screenwriter and director Françoise Lebrun play a couple who live together in a small, chaotic Parisian apartment covered in an amiable clutter of books and papers. He is evidently a film-maker or maybe a writer, working on a book about cinema and dreams entitled Psyche; she is a retired psychiatrist. They have a son, Stéphane (Alex Lutz) who is himself the father of a small boy, and burdened with drug issues and money and marital worries. The movie opens – ominously – with a video clip of Françoise Hardy performing the 60s chanson Mon Amie la Rose, about the mortality of flowers. Then Argento and Lebrun enjoy a modest meal on their rickety terrace: these are Lebrun’s final moments of lucidity. We learn that she suffered a stroke a few years ago and has been descending into dementia since then; recently the rate of decline has accelerated.
