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.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the black line down the middle. It's the only thing in the film that never moves.