Embracing Queer Absurdism with Gaspar Noé’s “Climax”

By Arthur Cormerais

 

Being born and dying are extraordinary experiences. Living is a fleeting pleasure.

Gaspar Noé‘s Climax (2018), from which you just read the synopsis, embraces queer culture as its core. The film is an answer to existential dread, putting emphasis on the necessity to understand what life has to offer. The way it does this echoes, however, a sort of a common queer experience, a queer absurdism.

 

Gaspar Noé on the set of Climax (2018). Courtesy of the artist and Wild Bunch.

Climax is another ethereal but suffocating film from Gaspar Noé, a Franco-Argentinian director known for having triggered many criticisms in Cannes with Irréversible (2002). Whereas Irréversible is not easy to recommend, Climax needs to be watched and celebrated for its audacity. Audacity for its technical performance, but also for the way it brings queerness under the light.

Climax depicts the downfall of a dance group, composed by various people, all of them embodying an original story – from krump, a swift dance thought to channel frustration which appeared in the early 2000s in Los Angeles, to voguing and waacking, passing by contortionism. Partying hard to celebrate their worldwide tour, the whole group goes under a horrendous journey – somebody spilled some drug in the sangria. And that is all. Atmosphere turns ominous, the camera is tweaking, lights are dazzling, and people are getting more and more violent against each other, as drugs, fear and suspicion unveil their deep nature. Gaspar Noé shot a chaotic masterpiece that embraces a pessimistic vision of mankind.

But the film is much more than a brief nightmare. Climax embraces queer culture and throws light on various queer artists. You need to know that Climax was first thought of as a project to praise the ballroom scene. This was for Noé the result of his encounter with Kiddy Smile, famous DJ and ballroom pioneer in France who introduced Noé to the ballroom scene which fascinated him. It is also Kiddy Smile who convinced the actors to take on this project, most of them having no prior acting experience. The result: a marvellous dance sequence that exudes the flamboyant energy of these queer underground spaces, while incorporating other counterculture dances. 

Still from Climax dir. Gaspar Noé. Courtesy of the artist.

Selva (Sofia Boutella) and the rest of the group dancing on the main stage. From Climax (2018) dir. Gaspar Noé. Courtesy of the artist and Wild Bunch.

Further adding to this queer visual is a remarkably diverse soundtrack. You’ll go from the very catchy-kitschy Patrick Hernandez’s Born to Be Alive to Kiddy Smile’s bop Dickmatized. Tracks that definitely evoke ballroom aesthetics: Thomas Bangalter’s “What to Do” is a good example of it. Noé also left room for the artists’ creativity: Climax relies on improvisation  – the artists were given a direction but were free to fully express themselves. Which is surely the best way to celebrate a culture that knows a story of invisibility.

Now it is easier to understand the essence of Climax. If Noe supports a pessimistic view on human nature, self-artistic expression becomes a way to overcome our fears and to channel violence. And this echoes queer culture. 

Dancing and singing, as voguing and performing,  are seen by Noé as tools to find peace while facing the so-perceived absurdity of our existences. Those words written in the press kit underline this idea: At their most intense, the pleasures of the present allow us to forget this vast emptiness. Joy, ecstasies – whether constructive or destructive – act as an antidote to the void. Love, art, dance, war, sport seem to justify our brief time on earth. Such an ode to performance in its purest meaning is firstly a philosophical assumption.

However, this way of seeing life echoes queer marginality. The journey of a queer person is always made of pitfalls and struggle. This violence is not meant to be tolerated, it is in fact absurd: but as it is inherent to our lives, it has become a need to face it, as performance, dance and music became ways to make something productive out of this. 

Still from Climax dir. Gaspar Noé. Courtesy of the artist.

Selva (Sofia Boutella) washing her hands in the middle of a bad trip. Still from Climax (2018) dir. Gaspar Noé. Courtesy of the artist and Wild Bunch.

When you put some perspective to this idea, you can see that performance and dancing are inherent to queer culture. It has always been a matter of reappropriating the way we look and act. Performing is embodying in a positive way why we and our peers get rejected. It is cathartic. In this strict moment, people embrace themselves and overcome the absurdity of their daily-life experience in which they feel ostracised. The velocity of queer dances and the vibrant music that goes with it are ways to reappropriate the faced violence. Maybe the extravagance, the attitude, the high-speed dances and music are just means to re-enact the violence that the community faces. Nightlife is an occasion for queers to take back control and to overcome an experience of what could be understood as a queer form of absurdism, in a Camusian meaning. 

French writer Albert Camus described in his work how one should live life to its fullest, precisely because it is senseless. To accept this absurdity is to be in a state of “révolte” – rebellion -, and it includes being free. Because one accepts this absurdity, they are able to live consciously and to experience life without considering its vacuity. Therefore, accepting queer absurdity will allow queer people a limitless space of creation in which meaning is being found. This truly a view that Climax fully agrees with. The film sheds light on the possibility of a queer understanding of Camusian absurdism. 

Selva (Sofia Boutella) and Lou (Souheila Yacoub) having an important conversation. Still from Climax (2018) dir. Gaspar Noé. Courtesy of the artist.

Selva (Sofia Boutella) and Lou (Souheila Yacoub) having an important conversation. Still from Climax (2018) dir. Gaspar Noé. Courtesy of the artist and Wild Bunch.

Queer experience is indeed absurd. Because of who we are, and how we decide to live, we can be rejected and often face difficulties. And because queer experience is an absurd experience, it is political: this absurdity can be overcome by means of forming communities and not being scared of expressing ourselves nor to impersonate who we want to. And Climax encourages us to do so. It celebrates queer creation in itself, for what it is. A fragile sublimation of violence, that can be beautiful but at the same time destabilised by self-sabotaging behaviours or less mutual support as a political margin.

At the time of homonationalism, with some queer people engaging with very righteous to far-right political activities – there are countless examples within the French political field, from Islamophobic gay former prime minister to far-right representatives who attend Drag Race viewing parties -, Climax proposes a refreshing queer experience. We can seek integration and catharsis without giving up on dissenting forms of expression rooted in queerness. Art is for Noé a way to fulfil our needs in mattering, whereas performance, whether it is social or artistic, is a way for queer people to survive and find their community.

Climax’s philosophy might not be directly about queerness, but its meaning is queer in its core. It helps us to embrace the absurdism of the violence that we experience and that is part of us. It calls us to face and refine the inherent violence that society strives us to carry in order to sublimate it. The violence shall no longer weigh but be turned into an energy so that we never stop expressing ourselves. Violence will still be there. Climax makes us acknowledge it, while still proposing a way of building out of this absurdity.

Climax is available to stream on Apple TV.

 

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Author

  • Arthur Cormerais is an aspiring journalist from France. Currently in Warsaw before doing Masters in Paris, he is a cinema fan and identifies as queer. He likes to tackle politics, social marginalisation, queer struggle and the medium of cinema.

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