Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Vortex
2021 · Gaspar Noé · Vortex on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the screen split into two images from the very start. (camera)
Noe runs two adjacent images side by side for nearly the whole film, one following each spouse, so a couple who share an apartment can no longer share a single frame.
Payoff: The film's central idea is visible before a word of dialogue: two people occupying one life but not one image.
Listen for how little music plays beyond the opening song. (sound)
After the couple toasts on the balcony to Francoise Hardy's 'Mon amie la rose,' the soundtrack drops almost entirely to ambient apartment sound, television, radio, the hum of the building.
Payoff: There's no score cueing your emotions, so the quiet itself starts to feel like part of the couple's shrinking world.
Notice the film posters and books pressing against medical papers. (setting)
The apartment is crammed with two intellectual lives stacked on top of each other, his cinema library against her psychiatric texts, decades of two careers sedimented into one small home.
Payoff: The clutter is a marriage made visible in objects, long before either character says a word about their life together.
Watch for moments that feel unrehearsed rather than performed. (performance)
The dialogue was largely improvised, and both leads carry long stretches on presence and rhythm rather than scripted lines, so their weariness and confusion read as unusually real.
Payoff: You are watching two people, not two performances, which is part of why the film is so hard to shake.
Watch how the two frames sometimes mirror and sometimes ignore each other. (cutting)
Every cut is really two cuts, a decision about what happens on the left and on the right, and whether the two sides are having the same moment at all.
Payoff: The editing keeps testing whether two people who share a home are actually sharing an experience. In the reading: any-space-whatever: disconnection. Deleuze calls a space split like this into disconnected affective fragments a disconnection, one address that no longer adds up to a shared home.
Once you have seen it
Notice when the two frames stop sharing the same room. (structure)
Early on the couple shares physical space in both panels; as her condition worsens the frames drift into separate errands and crises, until one image finally goes black at a death.
Payoff: The formal separation and the marriage's real separation happen on the exact same timeline. In the reading: the interstice / the AND. Deleuze calls a cut that joins by separating an irrational cut, and the black dividing line is exactly that made permanent.
Watch the apartment being emptied out, piece by piece, near the end. (setting)
In the film's last stretch the mise-en-scene itself is dismantled on camera, pictures taken down, furniture carried out, the ordered clutter of two careers cleared from the rooms.
Payoff: A life that filled every shelf in the apartment is reduced, on screen, to an empty room. In the reading: crystal-decomposition. The reading calls this crystal-decomposition, an ordered world rotting from within until nothing of its order is left to see.
Notice you are watching two real figures of film history. (performance)
Dario Argento and Francoise Lebrun carry decades of horror and French New Wave history into these roles, so an old man's face is also a filmmaker's, and an old woman's is also an icon's.
Payoff: The film is watching cinema's own memory grow old alongside the couple's.
Carry this in: Watch the black line down the middle. It's the only thing in the film that never moves.