Cli­max – first look review

A glit­ter­ing tri­col­ore hangs on the back wall of a grungy com­mu­ni­ty hall where a pro­fes­sion­al dance ensem­ble are gath­ered for what is to be their final rehearsal. As a thump­ing house track blares out from a PA sys­tem, the dancers launch into an exhil­a­rat­ing five-minute rou­tine, the cam­era cap­tur­ing their every bump, grind and twist in a sin­gle, swirling take.

They break only for the par­ty atmos­phere to imme­di­ate­ly be cranked up sev­er­al notch­es. The cam­era keeps rolling, rov­ing freely around the open-plan space to cap­ture snip­pets of con­ver­sa­tion by turns idle and inti­mate. The dancers laugh and chat and drink and dance some more. Then some­one spikes the punch and the cel­e­bra­to­ry set­ting is sud­den­ly trans­formed into a hedo­nis­tic hellscape.

Wel­come to the lat­est Very Bad Trip from that love­able rogue Gas­par Noé. The con­tro­ver­sy-court­ing Argen­tinean writer/​director of I Stand Alone, Irrevérsible and Enter the Void was last seen swag­ger­ing along the Croisette in 2015, when his erot­ic 3D romp Love was pre­sent­ed in an out-of-com­pe­ti­tion mid­night slot. Now he’s back in Cannes with, pre­dictably enough, a bang.

Depict­ing humanity’s worst excess­es is Noé’s forte, and he rel­ish­es putting his cast of twerk­ing twen­tysome­things through the wringer here. Among the per­form­ers in this Dan­tean dis­co are a bick­er­ing les­bian cou­ple, a sin­gle moth­er and her young son, an over­pro­tec­tive broth­er with inces­tu­ous incli­na­tions and a pair of adi­das-clad bros who casu­al­ly brag about hav­ing ​“dry” anal sex with the women in their com­pa­ny. Pic­ture the cast of Fame, only less whole­some and all whacked out of their minds on LSD.

And then there’s star-on-the-rise Sofia Boutel­la, who gives a per­for­mance that can only be described as com­mit­ted. It’s a pity Noé spends so much time chore­o­graph­ing the immer­sive long takes which make up the mer­ci­ful­ly lean run­time (when the cuts aren’t neat­ly con­cealed they’re sig­nalled by frame-fill­ing title cards which scream pseu­do-philo­soph­i­cal mot­tos such as ​‘Birth is a unique oppor­tu­ni­ty’) instead of flesh­ing out his char­ac­ters. It’s fun to watch them all go nuts (which was pre­sum­ably the only stage direc­tion Noé gave), but hard to actu­al­ly care about the gris­ly fate that befalls them.

All told, Cli­max makes for a rather dull and repet­i­tive view­ing expe­ri­ence, like ven­tur­ing into a night­club sober when every­one inside is already fucked.