Lux Æterna is an art-film freakout — and a designer fashion ad

polygon.com:

Only Gaspar Noé, the arch-provocateur of French film, would make a fashion ad like Lux Æterna. Commissioned by the luxury fashion house Saint Laurent, the film is a 51-minute, improvised, experimental art project featuring a staged witch burning and ending in an extended, throbbing nightmare of strobing light and sound. It might leave audiences feeling brutalized, exhilarated, amused, annoyed, or all of the above, but will it leave them feeling like they want to drop a thousand dollars on a handbag?

They will certainly feel like they’ve just watched a Gaspar Noé film. The director has a taste for extreme content and unconventional moviemaking techniques, and he loves to get a rise out of audiences and critics. He made his name with 2002’s Irréversible, a drama told in reverse chronological order and centered on a traumatically graphic extended rape scene. He followed it up with the first-person, disembodied head-trip Enter the Void. Then he cast porn actors in Love, a navel-gazing erotic drama, so he could shoot unsimulated sex scenes in 3D — including, naturally, an extreme close-up of a penis ejaculating directly at viewers’ faces. You get the idea.

Noé is one of the most self-mythologizing auteurs in the world, and sometimes it can seem like the most offensive thing about his films is how desperately he wants them to shock audiences. But he has undeniable gifts. His sleazy, lurid, neon-lit aesthetic, crafted with his regular cinematographer Benoît Debie, has a seductive, decadent glamour. (This is surely what Saint Laurent was after.) And he’s a master in the edit suite, where he invariably finds unusual ways to assemble his meandering footage and startling images into cinematic crescendos that can leave the heart