Two Gasper Noé films in a row is not Yours Truly’s usual diet, but here it goes, his 2002 Cannes’ shocking succès de scandale IRREVERSIBLE, his second feature, a revenge thriller and CLIMAX, his fifth, a corybantic hell-scape hell-bent on debasing a contingent of moronic young dancers into insensate beasts.Infamous for its repugnant simulated violence (two sequences, a human head is beaten into pulp by a fire extinguisher and a 10-minute long rape scene inside a dim-lit underpass), and innovative for its reverse chronology narrative (though Christopher Nolan has beat him to the punch two years earlier with the immaculate MEMENTO, 2000), in addition to its restively swirling camera movement and seamless editing that segue into the film’s tautly unreeling episodes, IRREVERSIBLE is cinema at its most hallucinogenic, iconoclastic and edgiest rebellion. As a sensorium-assaulting provocateur, Noé’s drug-addled perspective, barbaric aesthetics might well repulse any sane, narcotic-uncontaminated mind, but one must hand it to him for his brainwaves and going-for-broke chutzpah.Although the happenstances inside a seedy S&M gay bar called “Rectum” are deliberately rendered obscure and hugger-mugger, and the finality of an imminent rape is quite distressing, IRREVERSIBLE comes off less obnoxious in its second half, where audience can thankfully if temporarily, put the horror - after shoving the vicious signs of the times (homophobia, misogyny, transphobia) down our throat - behind one’s mind and find a timely respite in the intimacy stemmed from the real-life couple Bellucci and Cassel, who bare it all in their co-existence behind the closed door; while Dupontel as a gabby, cerebral ex-boyfriend, importunes her with his one-track mind to justify his defeat. The subject is commonplace, “talk the talk, walk the walk, that’s love in its perpetual contradiction”, but the brisk, almost jaunty rhythm and a sublime communion among the three protagonists (which is gazed by Noé’s now level-headed camera and is totally improvised by the actors) are mostly enchanting.But the cruelty is all-too-obvious, especially when it reveals that Bellucci’s character just finds out that she is pregnant, and the precognitive theme behind the narrative’s backward-progression settles in with a miserable whimper, IRREVERSIBLE is too tub-thumping and egocentric for its own good, it is a show-off and a screw-you (with grand sense of irony, revenge is another clusterfuck, the culprit ends up scot-free), yet, its confrontational spirit stalls in mid-stream, after which it tries to evoke something more profound or maybe poetic, despite that it is anything but in Noé’s elements, thus in the event, it becomes a curate’s egg, though with a more favorable overtone.In CLIMAX, Noé the enfant terrible again goes to extremes in mapping out his psychedelic nightmare, the plot is simple, 20 or so dancers are rehearsing in an abandon school, after drinking the sangria spiked with LSD (a supposition is never confirmed and the perpetrator is never divulged, or only implied in the end, but for what intention? Perhaps just for the hell of it?). Again substances are frugal but Noé’s visual and sonic outpourings are all over the place. Anyone of those swaggering, krumping, twerking and contorting dancers (inclusivity is well handled) can justly get a cattle call in a STEP UP movie and its umpteenth copy cats, only their terpsichorean aptitude cannot take the edge off their feather-headedness, and their small talks (again improvised) are monotonous (all sex-oriented), inconsequential and exhausting, any attempt of characterization is foiled by the wooden performances of these professional danseurs and danseuses. The only exception is Sofia Boutella, who nerves herself to do a hysterical tribute to Isabelle Adjani in Andrzej Zulawski’s POSSESSION (1981), only her madness remains skin deep.That exhausting feeling is refractory to dispel, even after Noé rings the changes by using overhead viewpoint to give viewers another go-round of the self-expressive dancing battle. As the drug kicks in, madness descends and malice emerges insidiously, two members who haven’t consumed the sangria is soon punished, and the rest is a protracted, raucous, claustrophobic, inconsequential performance art showcase stuck in a cul-de-sac, accentuated by its extreme long takes, inverted camera angle, and fluorescent hues that are showering and cowing everyone on screen into mental breakdown, and to this viewer, the result is a numbness-induced fatigue and mild headache.More akin to a one-trick pony than a bona-fide cinema auteur, Noé plays his “provocateur” card down pat, but if one looks for anything even remotely indicates a qualitative leap from IRREVERSIBLE to CLIMAX, bookending a 16-year span, disillusion is par for the course after the two films' disorientating, mind-bending after-effects eventually subsides. referential entries: Christopher Nolan’s MEMENTO (2000, 9.7/10); Andrzej Zulawski’s POSSESSION (1981, 7.5/10); Darren Aronofsky's MOTHER! (2017, 6.6/10).