The Movement: Climax (Gaspar Noe, 2019)
Never go with a theater kid to a second location.
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Immediately after finishing Gaspar Noe’s Climax, I needed to watch it again. This doesn’t happen to me often, but when it does, it’s a signal — something in my brain is rhyming with something in the movie, and I need to figure it out. The last time I can recall it happening was Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, a movie that Climax resembles more than a little: They’re both dance movies that are also horror movies. They start off by showing us bodies that can contort and move in astonishing ways, then turn those bodies against the world, or themselves, or each other, making their grace into something monstrous.
In Black Swan, the genre of dance was ballet, and the horror was about denial and perfectionism — being stalked by your own repressed urges while trying to put on a perfect show for the world. This was a story that appealed to me a lot in 2010, for reasons I won’t get into.
The dance in Climax is modern, and the horror is, too: Noe picked most of the dancers from the Paris ballroom scene, and others from YouTube or social media. The styles on display (voguing, waacking, krumping) all come from Black and/or queer and/or Black queer cultures, and the cast fits that profile. Most are people of color; many are queer; there are several trans performers, whose transness is never explicitly discussed on-screen, because it doesn’t have to be. The early scenes feel like an intensely lib-coded and corny affirmation of diversity: A multiracial group of mostly-queer people dancing around in front of a giant sparkly French flag, like a United Colors of Benetton ad without the subtlety.
But this is a horror movie; specifically, it is a Gaspar Noe movie, which means you are in for a deeply disgusting and upsetting time. Noe only shows us The Future That Liberals Want so that he can tear it up and set it on fire.