If "Lost in Translation" is the film you'd make when all you know about Japan are the pampered press junkets at Shinjuku 5-star hotels, then "Enter the Void" is what you would make if you never got beyond the Roppongi pub-crawl. Full of strip clubs, drug deals and loveless love-hotel sex, the latest provocation from France's enfant terrible Gaspar Noe follows the lives of several expats lost in Tokyo's seedier side.
Where Sofia Coppola's film was hit by charges that it perpetuated silly stereotypes of the Japanese (like the "lip my stockings" scene), one can say the exact opposite about Noe's; "Enter The Void" reinforces all the worst stereotypes that the locals hold about "bad gaijin."
Just take the film's lead characters: Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) is a near catatonic twenty-something drug dealer who slumps around Tokyo's nightclubs, turning clueless young Japanese women onto MDMA and other vices. (Japanese girl: "I like alcohol." Oscar: "If you like alcohol, you'll like drugs. It's the next step.") Oscar is the type of guy who will top off his LSD tab with a hit of DMT — a drug Hunter S. Thompson once described as being "like acid, but like you've been shot out of a cannon" — and then wonder whether his dealer has "anything stronger."