Vortex

dir: Gasper Noé

2022

This is more like what I had in mind when I recently wrote about the small sub-genre of dramas dealing with old people facing old age, and the younger people trying to muddle through looking after them. Films that don’t shy away from how hard old age can be, and how hard it can be to look after such oldies properly.

However, this flick is directed by the same man who 20 years ago made Irreversible, a film so horrific in its content that I don’t even want to talk about it. Since then he’s made complex and almost experimental films that have in no way tried to do what his first two hideous films did (the other one being I Stand Alone, which, again, I don’t even want to talk about), but have been no less provocative.

Of one of those previous films, I will say that the message at the end was “Le Temps Detruit Tout”, or “time destroys everything”. Vortex starts with the dedication: “To all those whose brains will decompose before their hearts.”

One should know going in this isn’t going to be cheery stuff. The director himself nearly died in 2020 of a brain haemorrhage, and prior to that looked after his mum who had dementia. So maybe he’s got a feel for mortality, and for the complexities of looking after helpless old people.

The central old couple here are in their 80s, and start off seeming okay. They have a cluttered apartment in the 10th arondissement, in Paris, near, of all places, the Stalingrad train station, and we first watch them having an evening aperitif on the balcony.

“Life is a dream, isn’t it?” she says to him.
- “A dream within a dream.”

Most of the film is shot with at least two cameras, one focussing on Him (legendary Italian director Dario Argento), and one generally focussing on Her (Francoise Lebrun) simultaneously. So we often are watching what’s happening to either of them when they’re in the same apartment or apart. It’s giving us two slightly out of kilter perspectives on something that’s happening right in front of us.

Right from the start it’s obvious she has no idea what’s going on around her, where she is, what she’s meant to be doing, or even who her husband is, most of the time. He spends time trying to find her at the local shops, and clearly this has been happening more and more lately.

Back in her apartment, it is all unfamiliar to her. We watch most of a day proceed (not in real time – it’s a long film but it’s not 24 hours long), and for the majority of that day she has been baffled by everything around her, muttering in half formed sentences to herself. Irritated by photos in which she and other people are captured, but she recognises neither herself nor the other person, and turns them over.

Oh irony of ironies: in her previous career she happened to be a psychiatrist, who would examine and diagnose people going through exactly the kind of dementia that she’s living with now, but, because of the dementia, she doesn’t really get that she has dementia, but she knows that something is profoundly wrong.

He, on the other hand, is more focussed on finishing his book about film theory and dreams, and does what he can to stay focussed on his work, so he does the best he can to ignore what’s going on with her, or isn’t so keen on having others around to help her because it would be a distraction for him.

Does he mean well? I guess. I dunno. Old people, to generalise massively, get used to a certain decrease in their mobility and the quality of life standard around them, and sometimes don’t try to change things because they don’t want to be a bother, or because they are scared of change, or they’re inhumanly stubborn or because they don’t want to lose their excuse to complain constantly – there are so many reasons, and it makes it immensely difficult to coordinate care for them. Sometimes it takes the shock of an outside person seeing how they live, or, more usually, something catastrophic happens to them, to allow for those circumstances to change.

They have a son, Stéphane (Alex Lutz), who actually cares about his parents and wants to protect them (from themselves), but everything he tries to change or organise the father rebuffs. He tries to organise a move to assisted living for both of them, and the father insists he’s going nowhere because all his stuff is here, in the apartment, and what’s more important than his stuff?

The whole while the mother, still baffled but sensing what they’re talking about, only says how she’s sorry she’s still alive, and how she wishes she wasn’t around anymore. And Stéphane, god love him, has profound problems of his own. He has a young son with whom custody is tenuous due to his mental health issues and the fact that he’s a recovering addict. Even if he could move in to look after them, he might lose custody of Kiki, and that would be a shame, considering it seems the kid’s mum, who we never see other than in a photograph, I think has mental health and recovery issues herself.

Everything just keeps getting worse and harder, and every conversation aimed at improving things is pointlessly rebuffed. The father, when asked if he’s gotten the mum to an appointment to be examined by someone with expertise, points out that he has a big list of people who he could call.

When asked who he’s spoken to about get care or help or support he refers again to these lists and lists of people. Not lists of people he’s called or spoken to on the phone or in person, just lists.

What the fuck is he even talking about? How do you reason with this level of obstinacy?

It’s not, I got the clear impression, like the old guy is doing too great mentally or physically himself, even way early on. They are people in their 80s. Even without profoundly serious neurological or cardiac conditions, for these oldies at least, almost no part of life is easy or safe or without significant peril.

Plus he keeps calling his former lover that he cheated on his wife with. Jesus, man, don’t you have enough on your fucking plate?

At an earlier age (for me), falling over because of a night of heavy drinking was, I’m ashamed to say, a source of hilarity and mirth, at least amongst ones’ friends who were either there, who caused it or at least heard about it. Even better if it was caught on video.

At their age the threat of a fall is, like, the end of the world. And those “medical alert alarms” that you can get them, that they could press in the event of an emergency (a fall, a fucking fall): how would that help if the person wearing it doesn’t remember what it’s for, or what to do with it?

I’m not exaggerating. I cannot begin to express how complicated, how involved falls for someone at that age can be. One fall, even without significant damage, still results in hospital stays, OTs (occupational therapists) cluck-clucking their tongues at you for letting your parents get to such a decrepit state, and weeks of drama before getting them home and being told in no uncertain terms “they probably aren’t able to look after themselves anymore”. Eventually after three or of these they tell you “we can’t release him unless you agree to be there for him 24 / 7, it’s either that or the old folks’ home”.

And whatever you decide, this can go on for years… until they fall down and can’t get up again, and you can’t lift them, for love or money. And then starts a whole other level of cascading catastrophe…

This film is pitiless in its gaze, in its representation of these people and what they go through, but it is not cruel. Other people have reviewed this film and said how rough it is – it’s nowhere near as rough as the real thing. I actually found it comparatively gentle. It’s just that the film is completely unsentimental about any of this. There are no profound, uplifting words that make the experience easier; there’s no last minute resolution, or people learning important things about themselves, and becoming better people through the experience.

There’s just sorrow, confusion, regret, grief, relief, guilt, and a bunch of other shit, and then the dead are dead.

Casting Dario Argento to play this role seems like stunt casting, but it probably enhanced the experience somewhat. It does allow someone like this director to stage the character’s collapse towards the end just like one of Argento’s classic giallo thrillers, even down to the lighting, except in this instance the ‘victim’ isn’t being stalked by a physical killer; they’re being stalked by old age and heart disease, and that killer always gets his way in the end.

I found through watching this flick that I am slightly terrified of Dario Argento, but he, like all of us, has been softened by age. Even to me, as a non-French speaker, it’s obvious that Argento doesn’t know French that well, but that hardly matters at all in this context. I’m glad, especially since he hasn’t made a decent film in ages (especially not since Daria Nicolodi died, who wrote the screenplays for the better movies he made), that he was at least in a really solid film about how unfair old age is.

The most effecting moments for me occur right at the end of the film, when everything from the apartment is taken out, slowly at first and then at speed, until there’s nothing left, and that place that looked lived in and loved before looks bare and old and pitifully empty.

I did not feel emotionally overwhelmed or anything like that by this film. It’s too blunt and prosaic for that (and after the year I’ve had, well…) But I felt it was a deft and honest realisation of these themes and this story, and I think there aren’t many flicks like it, and for good reason. Real life is sometimes harsher than art, even the art that Gaspar Noe comes up with.

8 times I try to catalogue the virtues and consolations of old age and I keep coming up short out of 10

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“I don’t want to leave this house where we’ve lived all our lives. I don’t throw away my past.” - Vortex