Vortex

The husband-and-wife octogenarians stuck in a whirlpool of infirmity in Vortex aren’t raging against the dying of the light. As it is, they can just keep their heads above water. Generically identified in the upfront credits by the French pronouns “Lui” (“Him,” Seventies giallo maestro Argento) and “Elle” (“Her,” Lebrun), the elderly Parisian couple resides in a labyrinthine flat cluttered by a lifetime of sentimental possessions. This lived-in chaos mirrors the inevitable untidiness of their advancing age. The hypertensive Him, currently focused on writing a scholarly book about film and dreams, conscientiously takes blood pressure medicine after suffering a stroke three years ago, but he struggles to keep his agitation in check. The rapid mental decline of Her dominates the film, as dementia begins to rob the former psychiatrist of the ability to recognize her spouse and 40ish son, Stéphane (Lutz), or to remember to turn off the gas on the stove, among other alarming things. “It’d be better if I was dead,” she resignedly says in a rare moment of lucidity during an overdue discussion of living arrangement options, a gut-punch scene performed by the three actors with improvisational poignancy. You could say Vortex is a modern-day horror movie, one with a storyline painfully familiar to many families today as the longevity of the human brain lags the viability of other organs.

French adulte terrible filmmaker Noé has long relished a self-appointed role of provocateur, whether showcasing a brutal, nine-minute anal rape in a backward chronology narrative about revenge (Irreversible) or filming actors engaged in actual sex in a limp pornographic romance whose crowning achievement is a 3D ejaculation splattering the camera lens (Love). Even guilty pleasures like his druggy Climax or the fashionably nihilistic Enter the Void feel like stunts, too. But this decidedly more conventional film about the anguish of senescence is different. Early on, Noé introduces a split-screen effect as Him and Her sleep side by side, an ominous black line slowly moving downward to eventually bifurcate the full frame and physically separate them for the remainder of the film. Like the best of Godard’s tricks, it works as an expression of pure cinema. Watching a bewildered Her wander inside the apartment or a nearby store like a mouse in a maze on one side of the screen, while an oblivious Him simultaneously goes about his daily rituals on the other makes for a powerful visual juxtaposition. Unrelenting and inconsolable, with a smattering of compassionate moments, the superb Vortex brings to mind an observation attributed to actress Bette Davis, no less: Getting old ain’t for sissies. C’est vrai, c’est vrai.