FILMS

Put Dario Argento and Gaspar Noé together and you assume you’re in for something demonic. Argento is the revered maestro of the Italian giallo horror cycle, the director of febrile chillers like 1977’s ; Noé (, ) is the linchpin of France’s ‘extreme cinema’, a tireless explorer of film as Bad Trip. Especially with a title like , you can expect to be in for a bad time, and that is indeed the case. Yet is not at all the Noé film you expect. It’s a mature departure from him, his simplest, realest film yet:a portrait of an elderly couple (played by Argento and veteran French actress Françoise Lebrun) whose lives unravel as dementia starts to affect the wife. That’s lives, rather than “life”, because their existence together begins to follow two parallel but separate tracks – something Noé depicts through the simple but disturbing device of having a black line drip down the screen, dividing it in two, as