Lux Æterna Review: Gaspar Noé Wields Film As a Weapon Against Itself

Gaspar Noé’s Lux Æterna may be yet another film about filmmaking spawned by an infamously navel-gazing industry, but make no mistake: This is not a love letter. Confined to a pressure-cooking 51 minutes, it follows the cursed production of God’s Work, a film with pretensions to out-art Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Day of Wrath. The stars of the film-within-the-film, Béatrice Dalle and Charlotte Gainsbourg, engage in a meandering, apparently improvised 10-minute conversation—presented in split screen—about their lives on and off set, before plunging into a distinctly Noé-like chaos that culminates in the shooting of a climactic witch-burning scene. Predictably, it doesn’t go according to plan.

As in Beware of a Holy Whore (Rainer Werner Fassbinder is one several directors not only referenced but directly quoted via intertitles), the actors, crew, and paparazzi crowding the set of God’s Work are constantly at each other’s throats. The set itself is a warren of corridors, lit in lurid greens or reds, that lead onto other sets. At one point, Gainsbourg seeks shelter in an empty TV set to take a call from her traumatized daughter and happens across a mutilated torso with only the penis intact. All this artifice suggests a dungeon of postmodern reflexivity from which there’s no exit because the world is nothing but a film studio.

To further stymie immersion, Noé uses split screen throughout, and to maddening effect, as the images on the opposite sides of the screen are all the more constrained by Lux Æterna’s 4:3 aspect ratio. During Dalle and Gainsbourg’s conversation, both actors initially occupy one of the split screens, while a burning fireplace occupies the other. But a couple of minutes in, a cut situates the actors in separate screens, replacing the shot-reverse-shot convention and isolating them, despite the fact that they’re seated across from each other in the same room. Noé disrupts even this casual conversation with menacing levels of artifice.

As the chaos escalates, though, the split screens begin to swivel like the eyes of a chameleon, independently. One half of the screen might follow Dalle and the other Gainsbourg, in two different areas of the set, one lit in green, the other in red, having two separate conversations, one in French, the other in English, so that following one thread means losing the other. Or it might show the same scene from slightly different angles, fracturing the space and evoking a world of roving, omnipresent cameras, infernal inquisitors devouring us from every angle.

If the film-within-the-film is a vapid fetishization of women’s martyrdom—and suspiciously in keeping with Dalle’s professed fantasies—Lux Æterna is a willful exercise in repulsing its own audience. Noé spares no effort to discombobulate the viewer. Characterization is limited to what we know of the real actors and mutual cruelty. Volleys of abuse, threats, and misogyny from both screens overlap on the soundtrack. The glow of auto-da-fé or apocalypse grows monotonous. In the angry mob gathered to enjoy the spectacle of Gainsbourg’s character’s punishment, the theater audience sees itself reflected. Noé draws an overt parallel between film and the sadistic pleasures of medieval punishment-as-entertainment.

And if shock by way of content is insufficient, the strobe‐lighted sequence that caps Lux Æterna guarantees our acute distress. What starts as a lighting malfunction takes on a life of its own as it coincides with a lull on set—and is all the more palpable in contrast to everything that comes before. The breakdown of artifice becomes a moment of searing bliss, a convulsive escape from “æternal” self-awareness, from the labyrinth of “nothing new under the sun.” For many, Lux Æterna will be nearly unwatchable, and for some, totally. But that seems to be Noé’s point, as he wields film as a weapon against itself. And he gives no indication of where we go after leaving the smoldering world of appearance and representation behind.