Lucile Hadžihalilović's La Bouche de Jean-Pierre (1996)

This medium-length film (fifty minutes) is by Gasper Noé's partner Lucile Hadžihalilović and we can see a clear preoccupation with young children as in her later films. Taking place mainly in a small appartment in an HLM, where Mimi (Sandra Sammartino) has been forced to go while her mother recovers from her suicide attempt, the colours here are predominantly sickly bright green and bright yellow.

This is racist territory, where Mimi's unwelcoming, self-centred aunt Solange (Denise Aron-Schropfer) willingly signs a petition against a family of Maghrébins (north Africans), and where Solange's new boyfriend Jean-Pierre (Michel Trillot) seems to be staying. Jean-Pierre's nature is shown by his violent use of strong language to a kindly neighbour who saw Mimi thrown out of the flat while Solange cleaned, and who let Mimi join him and his friends in a musical session; by him secretly watching a porn film on TV while Solange is asleep; but most of all by his casual attitude to a programme on paedophilia.

And Jean-Pierre is a paedophile, touching, stroking and trying to kiss the ten-year-old Mimi when Solange is out at work. For trying to warn Solange that he's a pédé Mimi gets a slapped face. Mimi attempts to escape a situation of sexual abuse over which she has no control by taking some of her aunt's diazepam supply, only to have her stomach pumped like her mother and to be sent back to her aunt and her paedophile boyfriend. Powerful and claustrophobic.

Gaspar Noé's Enter the Void | Soudain le vide (2009)

Many things could be cited as influencing Gaspar Noé's Enter the Void, among them Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Robert Montgomery's Lady in the Lake, etc., but perhaps the biggest is psychedelic drugs: this movie is a little like a drug trip in itself, and Noé is to be highly commended for, as is usual with him, pushing the boundaries of what the cinematic experience actually is. If he succeeds in shocking his audience, then all the better as this is his intention. Noé had been wanting to make this film for fifteen years, although financing was the problem. But after his success with the controversial Irréversible the dream became a reality: it's a pity, though, that the film was a commercial failure, but then this, like all of Noé films, is no entertainment. In fact, some may regard it more as an endurance test.

The whole film is seen through the eyes of Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), a guy who's living in Japan with his sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta) and who (in spite of his protests to the contrary) is a drug dealer and a drug addict. When he's tripping on DMT his friend Alex (Cyril Roy) comes to visit him and ask him about The Tibetan Book of the Dead he's lent him, which Oscar hasn't yet finished but is enjoying. But at the present time he has to meet Victor (Olly Alexander) to sell him some drugs, and he's waiting for Alex at a bar called The Void.

Alex walks towards the bar with Oscar, on the way telling him about his experience with datura. But he doesn't like the bar and waits outside while Oscar goes in. Inside, all Victor can say is he's sorry, and suddenly the police appear, Oscar dives into a toilet cubicle but it refuses to flush the drugs and the cops are hammering on the door. Still stoned, Oscar yells he has a gun and will use it, which causes the cops to shoot through the door and he collapses dead in a heap. And that's where Oscar's real trip begins.

What we have from then on is an out-of-body experience as Oscar sees what happens after his death, his spirit going over the past events of his life, and Oscar is even able to penetrate other people's minds, read their dreams.

Oscar's parents died in a car crash when he and his sister were young, and although they were sent to different children's homes they were very close and vowed never to separate. While living in Japan Oscar has managed, through selling drugs and through selling his body to Victor's mother, to pay for Linda's flight to join him, and she finds a job in a strip club.

After Oscar's death his dealer Bruno (Ed Spear), in fear of Japan's draconian drug laws, gets rid of his drugs and Alex takes to living on the streets. Linda is in a relationship with her boss Mario (Masato Tanno), gets pregnant and has an abortion. Oscar experiences his mother breast-feeding him, sees Linda and Alex going to a love hotel, sees inside his sister's vagina, sees sperm uniting with ovum, and via a process of false memory experiences his own birth.

Enter the Void isn't a difficult film to understand once the pieces of the jigsaw are put together, although it's quite a mind-blowing visual experience.

Gaspar Noé's Love (2015)

For some reason, Gaspar Noé's Love caused something of a stir, with the word 'provocateur' being bandied around everywhere. Well, there's nothing new about Noé being labelled a provocateur, and there's nothing new about real sex in an 'arthouse' film. Come to that, telling a story backwards – as Noé did in Irréversible – is not new, although in Love we know the end in the beginning.

Murphy (Karl Glusman) is married to Omi (Klara Kristin) and has a son called, er, Gaspar. Murphy is also the name Noé's mother was born with: does this suggest some autobiographical element? Well, Murphy is a film student – there are posters of The Birth of a Nation, M and Salò on his wall – and he's interested in making a film about 'sentimental sexuality', containing the basic fluids of life: 'blood, sperm and tears': he missed out sweat, but that's in here too. Really, what we have here is kind of modernised version of an old-fashioned love story, only without a happy end.

Murphy is really worried about his ex-girlfriend Electra (Aomi Muyock), who has gone missing and he and her mother fear that she has killed herself. We never find out if she has, but the film is a two-hour trip through Murphy's mind, into the past which led up to the situation he now finds himself in.

It's important to say that Murphy isn't really a nice guy: an American in Paris, he's extremely self-centred, jealous, pretentious, violent, lying, and of course wants everything to go the way he plans. It's OK for him to have casual sex in a bathroom at a party, but he becomes drunk and wildly jealous that Electra is, he believes, having sex with an art gallery owner – Noé himself in a wig – and attacks him. When he's told he should calm down and be more French, meaning that both he and Electra should have sex with other people but still keep together, they visit a club échangiste but he – you guessed it – gets jealous.

The crunch comes after Omi, Murphy and Electra have a threesome, after they've exchanged fluids that is. Omi by chance lives in a neighbouring flat, which is how they got together, and one day when Electra is not there she has a word  with Murphy over the balcony, invites him in and the inevitable happens. It's not inevitable that Omi should get pregnant though, but that's what it comes to: Electra taken off (maybe dead) and Murphy crying in the bath while he hugs little Gaspar. Yep, in spite of the huge helpings of sex (including cum shots), love is definitely the subject.

Gaspar Noé's Irréversible (2002)

The late prominent film critic Roger Ebert called Gaspar Noé's Irréversible a 'movie so violent and cruel that most people will find it unwatchable'. I can fully understand this, which is surely borne out by the number of hardened Cannes Festival viewers who walked out on it on the year of its release. This is certainly not 'entertainment', if what we mean by that is something which helps us to pass the time, something to enjoy, etc. No, this is gruelling, punishing cinema and the blurb on the back of my DVD says it will 'remain with [me] for all time'. I know this is true, and I am also convinced that this a great film, a very important one. What we see at the beginning – extreme (and apparently gratuitous) violence, indeed what we see in the middle, the infamous rape scene with its continuation by brutal battering of the supposedly same victim – is gradually unpicked by the past (in future revelations), and the viewer can see method in the madness.

The film is in fourteen sections, all in reverse cronological order: we start at the violent end and end at the peaceful beginning.  We begin with two men talking when we hear police sirens and we are then directed to Rectum, a gay S&M club where a stretcher carries out Marcus (Vincent Cassel), and the man we later know as his friend Pierre (Albert Dupontel), is arrested. Later, we discover that Marcus and Pierre had been looking for Le Tenia (Al Prestia), but they mistake him for Mick (Michel Gondoin) standing next to him. Marcus begins to attack him, Mick breaks his arm and attempts to rape him, and Pierre savagely beats Mick dead with a fire extinguisher. (There are over twenty blows, and the audience feels them all.)

We later (i.e. 'earlier') see Marcus and Pierre in a taxi looking for the Rectum club, and Marcus is in a vile violent mood. The taxi has been hi-jacked by them from its Chinese driver. Previously, Marcus had found a transsexual prostitute who knows Le Tenia, and, acting like a maniac, he threatens her with a piece of broken glass to get information from her.

Next we see Alex (Monica Bellucci) on a stretcher, Marcus and Pierre questioned by the cops, and Marcus and Pierre trying to find the man who raped and attacked her. Alex leaves a party, takes an underground pedestrian passage and is savagely anally raped and beaten into a coma by Le Tenia. Alex had left the party because of Marcus's use of drugs, alcohol and general obnoxiousness. Pierre was once in a relationship with Alex, although she left him for Marcus.

Alex had previously said that she might be pregnant by Marcus, who seems to like the possiblity: this is clearly a very loving relationship. Alex tests herself and is delighted to find out she's pregnant. We see Alex in a park reading J. W. Dunne's An Experiment with Time, the film blurs into subjectless strobe, and a sign saying 'Le Temps détruit tout' ('Time Destroys Everything') appears, which is a message that appears at the beginning of the film: one very favourable review of this film said time doesn't destroy the memory of this film, and I know it won't. This is a masterpiece, love it or hate it.