142 min | NR | April 29, 2022 | Utopia
An old man writes about cinema while his wife’s mind comes apart in the next room. Gaspar Noé splits the screen in two and never lets the halves touch again. It is the gentlest film he has ever made and the one most likely to wreck you.
An elderly couple lives in a cluttered Paris apartment stuffed with books and film posters. Lui is a writer working on a book about cinema and dreams. Elle is a retired psychiatrist whose mind is dissolving into dementia. Gaspar Noé splits the screen down the middle and keeps the two of them in separate frames for nearly the entire film. The movie is about the moment when a long marriage becomes two people who share the same rooms and no longer share the same reality.
Dario Argento plays Lui as a man who still believes his work matters and refuses to see how fast his wife is slipping away. He carries on phone calls about his manuscript while she wanders the streets in her nightgown. Françoise Lebrun plays Elle with a terrifying interior logic. She moves through the apartment with total purpose, and the purpose makes no sense to anyone watching her. Alex Lutz plays their son Stéphane, an addict trying to manage parents who cannot be managed, and he carries the exhaustion of a man who keeps arriving too late to fix anything.
Gaspar Noé writes and directs, and the split-screen construction is the entire argument of the film. The dividing line never lets the two halves merge, even when the couple lies together in the same bed. The camera traps each of them inside a separate maze of doorways and narrow hallways within the apartment. The editing lets one frame go dark while the other keeps living, and the screen itself enacts the loss. Noé strips away the strobe effects and shock tactics of his earlier films and lets the camera simply watch.
This is the most restrained film Gaspar Noé has made and the most devastating. There is no score telling you how to feel and no twist waiting at the end. The split screen could have collapsed into a gimmick. Instead it becomes the cleanest possible image of what dementia does to a marriage, two people side by side and already alone. Noé watches the end of a life without flinching and without consolation, and the discipline is the whole point.