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Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) is nothing but a little American drugdealer in
Tokyo, and he aqlso makes the mistake to take his own drugs himself, which
more than once cloouds his judgement. His friend Alex (Cyril Roy) tries to
keep him from getting into too much trouble, but then again, Alex is a
sleazy and far-out artist who doesn't always have the best grip of reality
himself. Anyways, eventually Alex is lured into a trap and shot dead by
the cops. Alex, who was with him, manages to get away and phones Oscar's
sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta ... ... which opens a whole new aspect of
the story: Oscar has always loved his sister Linda, but after their
parents have died when they were little, they were seperated and given to
different foster parents. Eventually, Oscar went to Tokyo, and he got into
drugdealing to save up enough money to pay the airfare for his sister to
meet him there and finally live together as it was meant to be. Once
Linda has joined him in Tkyo though, Oscar introduces her to his lifestyle
of partying and drug abuse. Eventually, Linda starts to work as a
stripper, something Oscar doesn't 100% approve of, nor of her relationship
to a Japanese man, Mario (Masato Tanno). When Oscar is shot and Alex tries
to phone her about it, Linda has sex with Mario. She later learns she is
pregnant from him, and Alex's death might have been the point of her
conception. Linda has an abortion. Yet another aspect of the story:
Oscar has a regular customer, Victor (Olly Alexander), a teen he has
really grown fond of - but he also shags Victor's attractive mom, and when
Victor questions him about it, he admits to it. Victor reacts with a fit
of rage, but not only that, he also betrays Oscar to the police, which
eventually leads to Oscar's death by police bullets. Later Victor,
overcome by guilt, pays a visit to Linda to apologize - but she simply
cannot forgive ... duh! It all ends in a trippy trip to a love hotel
where couples have sex in all the rooms, and all the men have light
penisses - and I have no idea what that has to do witht he rest of the
film. Enter the Void is probably like hardly anything
you have ever seen, a 161-minute trip-like movie that combines a weirdly
designed soundtrack with accomplished long tracking shots, fascinating
pans over the roofs of nighttime Tokyo, computer animations masterfully
blended with real life footage, hypnotic colour scales and the like ... ...
and all of this, ironically, makes the film one big failure, an overblown
sensory overkill that desperately tries to bury the simplistic story its
trying to tell under fascinating surface after fascinating surface. Fact
is, the film was skillfully planned, and lets you feel it in every frame,
but the soul of the film is weirdly lacking. After a while, it feels just
like an overlong musicvideo, with sexscenes thrown in as calculated
provocations, that always carefully refrain from being explicit though,
which makes them sort of empty in the context. Sure, you can try to see
the film as some kind of narrtative puzzle, due to its non-linear plotline
- but even as that it fails, as the intentional non-linear storytelling
soon exposes itself as a series of good old-fashioned flashbacks, and the
metaphors and symbolism woven into the plot come across as incredibly
heavy-handed. That all said, the film is still kind of fascinating, if
you want to see an able artisan at work - but at 161 minutes it's also a
test to your patience ...
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