Lux eaters.

Eternal light.

In the work of the French director Gaspar Noé, it probably refers to the fluttering flame of the film medium, usually at 24 frames per second.

This is namely meta so it flashes in the skull - mostly maybe because of that stroboscope light that the filmmaker is so happy to let invade the audience's visual center.

Let it be said that epileptics should not even come near a cinema showing the Lux eters.

It was hard enough anyway, without such a diagnosis.

If one

harbores a basic skepticism in the face of the film rabble-rouser Noé's effect-seeking, the stroboscope becomes like another cry for help from an attention-hungry man;

a gimmick that should connote drug abuse and heated confusion.

Slightly sad and dated.

But okay, it can be congenial for this very 51-minute-long film, which allows us to be part of a filming of a movie about witch-burnings, inspired by the Danish Carl Dreyer's Wrath Day from 1928. Here there is complete chaos and confusion: Béatrice Dalle (Betty Blue) and Charlotte Gainsbourg basically play themselves, but in inflated versions, the producers are raving, the extras are swarming around and like onions on salmon we have a classy film journalist who does not understand at all that he is unwanted on the recording (okay, that where the last is actually a pretty funny boot against us on the other side of the creative fence).

For a metaphorist

, this should be a single wonderfully stimulating experience, but just like many other of Gaspar Noé's creations, the brazen execution stands in the way of any exciting thoughts.

An often recurring split screen, sometimes in three parts, with movements in different directions, reinforces the message that this should not be thought of, only be understood.


Lots of screaming for some wool, as the farmer said.

Well, you should probably see it as a tribute to the art-creating genus, there are quotes from the said Dreyer but also from greats like Fassbinder and Dostoevsky.

And maybe it's a bit about young women's exposure on a film recording.

A young model does not want to show her breasts while the older ladies have been refined and talk about people as objects themselves.

Béatrice Dalle says she wants young boy meat, a 16-year-old is six years too old ...


A pedophile joke that does not directly raise the mood.

As a fundamentally

uninterested in clothing brands, I have to read that the Lux ether was initially intended as a promotional film for the fashion house Yves Saint Laurent, and that Gaspar Noé managed to persuade those who own the money box to make a longer film of it all - which also had the honor of being shown as a midnight film at the Cannes Film Festival.


An ambulance is said to have waited outside the salon to take care of people who might be collapsing from the Lux ether's attack on the senses.

Effect seeking, as I said.

Gaspar Noé is doubly cinematic this winter with the new release of the director's controversial rape film, Irriversible (2002), which took place backwards.

Premiere on December 18, now in a version that follows conventional chronology.