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.”
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