The Color Palette of Gaspar Noé

Gaspar Noé is unlike most filmmakers. Through the view of an audience member, his films rung different tunes with fourth wall breaking in the opening credits and stylized - violence in the simplest of forms. It’s domestic and idiosyncratic, but retains an atmospheric sense of reality. It shows you different variations of the human mind that you can't help but fight the need to look away. You could say it is some of the many reasons there is a strong gravitational pull between his films and I.

But what has truly turned all my eyes on Gaspar Noé, is how he makes color a character or entity that looms over the characters in his films. These predominant colors are red, orange, and mustard yellow and various shades of. It relays the industrial look that the toxicity within can form together amongst people and the relationships that were created or destroyed.

Our mental stasis is as fragile as the simple glass package. Irreversible, Love, and Climax shows us that through different means and ways. One film is a revenge tale, where our lead character goes out for blood to get the man who brutally raped his girlfriend. Another tells a tale of a man's redemption after an unfortunate threesome with his girlfriend, where after the third partner ends up pregnant from the male's deceptions further along in the story. And the other is a primarily improvisational psychological horror where the characters create an alternate version of themselves on LSD.

Irreversible - 2002

Climax - 2019

Love - 2015

The colors’ abundance reflects a mental instability that creates the unease. The sharpening colors that inflect a nauseating haze.

It reflects our worse nature. At times there are parts that we never represent in our everyday life because of the inner fight there is for calm and collective. Some of us can’t fight it enough and it comes out in various forms like in Vincent Cassal’s violent revenge in Irreversible or the bathtub scene in Love where Murphy is beside himself for fucking up. The saturation becomes heavy on him through the light in multiple scenes that shows Murphy and Electra and their respective "journeys."

And while Love, like Irreversible, has the colors act like a looming shadow of a character that comes with certain emotions. It uses it as more of a cadence for their personalities and not a demonizing being that waits for disaster to become more like in Irreversible.

But Irreversible use of flashes and blurs rectifies our knowledge of who the leads are and the journey taken. In a way color is a shadow that looms over our characters that shows them at their most vulnerable. It is always in an aggressive nature as Marcus fights his way through the gay BDSM club to find La Tenia, his girlfriends rapist. The moment he thinks he finds him and bashes his head on the club floor. The lights on the streets as Alex walks toward the tunnel.

It’s the heightened emotion of the characters at hand. Irreversible uses the nauseating colors with blurs and flashes as our lead goes through a journey of revenge. During its infamous scene of Alex’s (Monica Belluci) rape, by La Tenia, it is predominantly blured as more contrast and saturation is added to the surroundings in the post op.

These colors become a draining filter into a personal hell some of us don’t ever see. LSD as a drug can make you dive deeper into your subconscious and could make or break you. And Climax's lack of subtlety allows it to spin the mystery of who spiked the sangria and the mystery of who these dancers are. Prior to the opening dance number, there are minimalist interviews with the dancers. Outside of the basics there is little to know. So with the preconceptions it flips many angles and you look for the next person ready to crack.

The allure of it can be seen in the long-take opening sequence where everyone is dancing to the routine at the locked down school.

The film takes twists with it’s representation of such. In a scene of pure silence, a dancer faces a mirror and loses touch with the walls that blocked her insecurities. She would proceed to light her hair on fire… only to realize what she has done….

To explain more would not justify the intention being brought upon me to influence you to go and watch these movies and see the awe that they create.