FOR YEARS THEY’VE BEEN SHOCKING CINEMA AUDIENCES, WITH FILMS THAT HAVE BROKEN THE MOULD AND BLOWN MINDS. AS THEY TEAM UP FOR VORTEX, WE MEET DARIO ARGENTO AND GASPAR NOÉ TO DISCUSS AN UNHOLY ALLIANCE — AND A HISTORY OF CONTROVERSY

WORDS STEVE ROSE

ILLUSTRATION MIKE CATHRO

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DARIO ARGENTO AND GASPAR NOÉ HAVE SERVED UP SOME OF THE MOST EXTREME IMAGERY IN CINEMA.

Italy’s Argento is one of the world’s greatest horror directors, having revitalised the genre in the 1970s and ’80s with a blend of vivid violence and amped-up atmospherics. Argentine provocateur Gaspar Noé, meanwhile, has his own proud record of subversive themes and sensoryonslaught visuals.

Argento has given us maggots raining down on ballerinas (Suspiria), a woman forced to witness her boyfriend’s murder by needles taped under her eyelids (Opera), and Jennifer Connelly as an insect-controlling psychic saved by a cut-throat-razor-wielding chimpanzee (Phenomena). Noé’s showreel of shock includes a horrifically violent revenge story told in reverse (Irréversible), a trippy Tokyo odyssey told from the point-of-view of a dead person (Enter The Void), and a dance movie that devolves into hallucinogen-fuelled madness (Climax).

For Noé’s latest, Vortex, the pair have teamed up — although the film is a departure for both. Noé has coaxed the granddaddy of giallo in front of the camera, Argento embarking on an acting career at the ripe old age of 81, while Noé abandons cinematic excess in favour of documentary-like simplicity, the drama tracking the harrowing decline of an elderly Parisian couple. Argento plays a retired film critic; Françoise Lebrun (best known for the 1973 French classic The Mother And The Whore) plays his wife, a former psychiatrist with advanced dementia. Noé allows himself one cinematic flourish: he renders the couple’s lives side by side via split-screen, which conveys both their intimacy and their separation, as they meander on different trajectories around their cluttered apartment.

In its own way, Vortex is as extreme as anything either filmmaker has ever done, in that it deals with the plain, everyday reality of its subject matter, unflinchingly, proving that neither Noé nor Argento have lost their edge. We sat down with them to discuss life, death, notoriety and movies. They did not hold back.