Opening at IFC Center on Friday April 29 is Vortex, director Gaspar Noe’s shattering portrait of an elderly couple shakily hanging on by a thread in their cluttered, lived-in flat.
The great Italian director Dario Argento plays the husband, with heart problems and attempting to write a book about dreams and cinema, while his dementia-addled wife (Francoise Lebrun/The Mother and the Whore) wanders around the apartment agitated and confused. Their son (Alex Lutz– excellent) has serious problems of his own and is raising a little boy. He tries (in vain) to talk them into moving to an assisted living center because they just can’t take care of themselves. But their love, their history is in this apartment. The tragedy is that their vibrant lives are now cruelly diminished by old age.
Dario Argento plays with great warmth and intellectual acuity- he treats his failing wife with weary exasperation but compassion. Francoise Lebrun is just astonishing- this is a harrowing performance. As grueling as all this is, Noe frames it in split screen and artful ways, and with great tenderness as well as sadness. The finale is one of the most poignant and profound I have seen on film in many years.
