by Jason Adams
Andrzej Żuławski's 1981 freak-out flick Possession, starring Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill, has spent the past couple of decades being rediscovered as a major work of art -- Adjani won Best Actress at Cannes and the Cesars that year but the film was nearly chopped in half for its U.S. release (from 126 minutes down to 81) making an already cryptic and eccentric story totally incomprehensible. In short it bombed, and critics here in the US sneered. Still one has the feeling that the film's become a foundational text nowadays, and this year's Gaspar Noé movie Climax, with its gloriously unhinged central performance from Sofia Boutella, feels like Adjani's LSD-soaked descendant.
A professional dancer before becoming an actress it's only natural that Boutella would nail the physical requirements necessary to play Selva, the lead figure in Climax's troupe of overripe boogie-woogers who get more than they bargained for from the homemade sangria served at their snow-bound after-party...
Noe opens the film with the gang in celebratory formation and Boutella immediately emerges from the at first well-contained chaos as the big bright shining star, a spotlight seemingly fixed to her tangerine dream of a dress. She pops, oh how she pops.
But like any explosion its the fallout that brings the real buggering, and Climax disintegrates into absolute bedlam fairly fast -- when Variety reviewed Possession in 1981 they said it "starts on a hysterical note, stays there and surpasses it as the film progresses," and one can only wonder how they'd take the brain-melting theatrics on display here, ones which may have left even Żuławski a quivering heap crying for his momma. Climax is nothing but climaxes, an endless assault, a tea kettle singing on the surface of an active volcano.
Boutella though, she somehow carries us through it. Like a superhero floating in outer space and absorbing a nuclear blast into her every atom she wields the mania into a presentable form -- you can feel every snap and crackle of electricity coursing through her as she glides up and down these hell-strewn hallways, witnessing horrors best left unwitnessed -- she gives anarchy its shape, and channels Noé's excesses into a symphony of movement, terror, form.
