Climax

21 young dancers from all over the world, spend an exuberant evening together. After many hard rehearsals, a big tour is about to start. First through France, then through the USA. All participants are excited, their bodies vibrate with adrenaline. The mood is exuberant, everyone dances to the beats that fill the room. But then the mood tips when Selva (Sofia Boutella) discovers that one of them has mixed drugs into the sangria. Now begins a crazy trip full of mutual suspicions, delusions and panic - a trip that will change everything.

One thing right off the bat: Climax is undoubtedly Gaspar Noé's most innocuous and accessible film to date. However, of course, that doesn't mean that the not-uncontroversial filmmaker is presenting light fare here. But he refrains here both from very explicit sex scenes as in Love or from hard-to-digest violence as in Irreversible. What remains is a visual trip that is truly mesmerizing, at least at first. Here, the viewer gets to see a dance sequence shot in one take, which Noé has executed in a truly original and stirring way.

But what follows can only be described as extremely exhausting. It starts with minutes of trivia. It's really annoying when two of the dancers talk about anal intercourse in the most primitive way. Or when some relationship problems are discussed on a soap level. When the drugs come into play, the whole thing just gets wild and hysterical. This may, as is always the case with Noé actually, be visually intoxicating. But it also begs the question: why should I spend my time watching not-quite-sympathetic people made even more unsympathetic, even downright repulsive in places, by drugs?

True to the motto Is this art, or can this go away, Climax will also divide opinions. For me personally, the film was hard to beat in terms of irrelevance, even though I find the visual style quite intriguing. But in the end, the film left me completely cold emotionally, which has never happened to me before with any film by Gaspar Noé. A really very special film that is rather recommended to a niche audience

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp