Welcome, Daily Grindhouse readers, to a new feature here on the site. In this ongoing intergenerational cinematic experiment, Riley Cassidy will subject her mom to all kinds of gruesome, sensational, and provocative movies and document the experience as a sort of reverse parental guide, seeking to answer the age old question every exploitation fan has asked themselves at one point or another: Will Mom Like This?
Sharing movies with loved ones is a beautiful thing. As beautiful as it is, I think we have all experienced a moment while watching a movie with a parent or any comparable figure, where the thing taking place on screen was so uncomfortable you wish the couch would swallow you whole. We’re going to try and avoid that as much as possible! I hope this works as a sort of guide for you to know when you should excuse yourself to refill the popcorn bowl and avoid the wrath of a disgruntled or disgusted parent. Let’s get into it! This month, we will be diving into Gaspar Noé’s acid drenched nightmare, CLIMAX.
CLIMAX takes place over a single night and follows a group of dancers celebrating a successful rehearsal. The celebration takes a turn however when it becomes apparent that the sangria everyone has been tossing back has been spiked with LSD, producing… strong reactions. How could my mom not love that? I’m sure she’ll let us know.
“This is Weird”
Things start out pretty fun in CLIMAX with an unforgettable dance sequence. The dancing is an incredible strength of this movie with some of the most impressive choreography I’ve ever seen, and it is impossible not to be infected with the energy on screen. This was probably the high point for me and my mom, as we both really tried to mimic the dance moves to the best of our ability in our little Zoom windows. Arms were flailing. My mom did say she was getting dizzy just a few minutes into the dance sequence, and for anyone who is familiar with CLIMAX, you know that doesn’t bode well for the rest of the film. Even my mom’s favorite part of the movie couldn’t keep her content for long, however. When the dancing starts again, copious amounts of sangria have been consumed and things are a little sloppier and a lot more frantic and my mom was quickly starting to get wiped out by the movie as a whole, saying “Oh geez, I gotta sit back.”
CLIMAX is a very unique movie, and while I do believe that my mom has a very open mind and appreciates many kinds of art forms, I have known her to get incredibly annoyed when she perceives something as being weird just for the sake of being weird. This is something that we ran into almost immediately, as in CLIMAX the decision was made to run the end credits at the very beginning of the movie. It was too soon for her to be outright annoyed, but she did hum somewhat judgmentally, and say “Wow, short movie.” CLIMAX follows no real narrative structure and instead allows the story to happen to you as you watch events unfold and unravel. My mom is a busy woman and has no time for nonsense, so as the film devolved into a mess of tangled limbs, wordless screams, and gratuitous violence, her patience waned. Again, breaking from the norm, the list of cast and crew names is displayed on screen smack dab in the middle of the movie, and I think this solidified her opinion when she said, “What the heck, I do not get his point of view,” which is my mom’s polite way of saying “This is bullshit.” I tried relating Gaspar Noé’s work to David Lynch, a director she’s familiar with and someone who has certain similarities to Noé’s style, but she wasn’t having it, saying “This guy makes David Lynch look like Frank Capra.”
Tripping Balls
Not only is CLIMAX a movie in which all of the characters are tripping, it also strives to make its audience feel as though they have taken mind-altering drugs as well. One of the ways this is accomplished is through wild camera movements, sometimes rotating a full 180 degrees. This led to both my mom and I turning our heads at all kinds of unnatural angles, and by the end of the movie, my mom flipped herself entirely upside down, saying “Oh, I feel so much better.” Although the drug aspect doesn’t hit immediately because the acid doesn’t hit immediately, once it arrives, there is no mistaking it. I could sense my mom getting a little antsy, waiting for things to rev up during the prolonged conversations in the first act of the movie (more on that later) until suddenly, one dancer, Psyche (Thea Carla Schott), begins urinating all over the floor. This moment flips a switch on CLIMAX. beyond the point of no return. My mom seemed to understand this right away, saying “I’m not going to like anything that happens for the rest of this movie, am I?” and she was pretty on the money with that one.
The Horror of it All
The last French horror movie my mom and I watched together (RAW) was full of obscene gore and body horror, and CLIMAX is no different, in terms of the overall bad vibes. One of the most unfortunate and taboo moments this movie tackles is the death of a child. As soon as this adorable kid Tito (Vince Galliot Cumant) appears on screen my mom clocked the potential threat, saying “Nothing better happen to Tito or I’ll be irate,” and I audibly gulped. I had a hard time looking her in the eyes after that, even through our computer screens. Luckily (or unluckily) we don’t hang in suspense for too long, as we can see Tito in the background of a wide shot, chugging a cup of the sangria. I caught this before my mom did, and held my breath until I heard her scream, “Oh noooooo!” You would think a small child ingesting a large amount of LSD and alcohol trapped in a building with around twenty adults who are freaking out because drugs are melting their brains would be bad enough, but don’t worry, it gets worse. Tito’s mom (Claude Gajan Maull) locks him in an electrical closet in order to keep him safe from the aforementioned melty-brained adults, and she tells him to be careful not to touch anything so he doesn’t get electrocuted. Because of this, when later in the movie, there is a zapping noise and all the lights in the school go out, my mom tenderly clutched her chest and said, “Oh no, there goes Tito.” We know it’s coming, but it doesn’t hurt any less.
But don’t worry, the death of a child isn’t the only horrific thing to happen in CLIMAX. For example, one character, Lou (Souheila Yacoub), is revealed to be pregnant, only to be kicked in the stomach by Dom (Mounia Nassangar) and forced to miscarry because Dom suspects Lou spiked the sangria with LSD (Spoiler alert: She didn’t). At this point my mom was hollering, “Why did she do that?!? She’s so mean!” before saying she was too stressed out to even drink the themed sangria I had suggested for our watch party. After being taunted and accused by all the other dancers, Lou then uses a knife to slash at her own face and arms, and this had my mom SCREAMING. This was enough for my mom to declare that this was the worst party ever, and I couldn’t argue with her there.
Sex Ed
Although the bulk of the action comes in the latter half of CLIMAX, there is still plenty of stuff early on to make a parent uncomfortable. Notably, two of the dancers, Cyborg (Alexandre Moreau) and Naab (Naab) go into graphic detail about all the sexual acts they want to engage in with the other dancers. This conversation includes topics such as dicks and lube and asshole licking. I think that some of the edge may have been taken off due to the fact that it is in French so we were reading subtitles rather than hearing these things spoken in a language we understand, but I was still squirming in my seat. Although there was a tangent about poop that sent me into uncontrollable giggles until my mom yelled “enough!”
Additionally, early on in CLIMAX, siblings Taylor (Taylor Kastle) and Gazelle (Giselle Palmer) have a conversation about blowjobs and my mom was not okay with that line being crossed. Now if you’re like me and you’ve seen this movie before, you know that this conversation is the least of our worries, as Taylor and Gazelle engage in full on acts of incest later on. Luckily, the first time the actual incest becomes obvious, there was so much else going on (people with their hair on fire, people screaming and crying, people contorting etc.) that she didn’t even notice it going on. I was not about to be the one to point it out to her, so I just held my breath, and I really thought I was going to get away without having to confront that with her. Alas, dear reader, my mom is too smart for that, and near the conclusion of CLIMAX we hear Taylor say to Gazelle, “Don’t tell Dad.” It all clicked together for my mom at that moment, and with only seconds to go until the movie’s end, we reached nuclear meltdown point. In my mother’s own words, she called that reveal, “the ick cherry on top of poop ice cream.” To each their own, I suppose.
Miscellaneous Advisories
While I do my best to include all of my mother’s pearls of wisdom into the above categories, some of the things she says are in a league of their own, so I will list them for you below:
- She essentially summed up the entire film by saying, “They’re either having sex, contorting, or having a seizure, and I can’t really tell the difference.”
- She threw her hands up when we were presented with yet another extended sex scene, saying “Might as well!”
- She mocked the text on screen at the movie’s conclusion that read “Life is a collective impossibility,” by clarifying “This movie is a collective impossibility.”
But Did Mom Like That?
So the time came to ask the question, did Mom like that? Well actually, I didn’t really have to ask because the minute the credits rolled, she took in a gasping breath and screamed, “BOOOOOOOOO,” at the top of her lungs. 0.5/5 moms would recommend. She didn’t have the best time. I pressed her to see if there was anything at all that she did like and she said, “the dancing thing, they were good dancers,” so at least Nina McNeely’s choreography seems to be a crowd pleaser. Try not to worry too much about my mom though, because she did engage in some self-care afterwards by watching scenes from HAIRSPRAY (2007), so I think she’s doing okay.
Tags: Benoît Debie, Claude Gajan Maull, Dance, Denis Bedlow, Drugs, France, Giselle Palmer, Horror, Kiddy Smile, Romain Guillermic, Sofia Boutella, Souheila Yacoub, Taylor Kastle, Thea Carla Schøtt, wild bunch
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