In 2008, The Class won the Palme D’or “out of nowhere” — or so it seemed, as the film hadn’t screened before a large chunk of the press had gone home. Almost as if pulling a bait and switch on journalists who stayed through the final weekend the following year in fear of missing a second Oscar-safe “surprise”, the 2009 Cannes lineup saved not the best for last, but certainly the most balls-out and commercially unviable. The two films I saw on my final day in the South of France were admirably experimental, undeniably gorgeous to look at, obstinately focused on form over narrative, so ambitious as to threaten to render that word meaningless as an adjective, and really fucking hard to watch.

All evidence would suggest that, even when seen under perfect conditions, Tsai Ming-Liang’s Visage poses an extreme challenge to traditional notions of narrative cohesion. The film’s synopsis in the Cannes guide suggests a linear story — “A Taiwanese filmmaker makes a film based on the myth of Salome at the Louvre…the director suddenly learns of his mother’s death. The producer flies to Taipei, to attend the funeral. The director falls into a deep sleep where his mother’s spirit does not seem to want to leave her old apartment” — but that story is only manifested on screen in the vaguest sense (for one thing, that Laetitia Casta has been cast as Salome in the film within a film is a fact never in any way made explicit). As David Phelps put it in his writeup of the film at The Auteurs, “each room and each shot in Visage is nearly self-contained from the rest..[the story] told entirely as visual evidence.” In practice, the synopsis doesn’t synopsize; it doesn’t seem to come after the film and sum it up, so much as it comes before, to offer a starting point for Tsai’s succession of moving paintings. (And it totally leaves out the fact that the film is a kind of ghostly love letter to Francois Truffaut.) The obliqueness is not inherently a problem — if art film deviates from commercial film in that it discards the what and the why for the what it looks like and how it feels, Visage simply veers further off the commercial path than any other film in the Cannes competition this year.

The problem stems from the fact that I did not see Visage under perfect conditions. Twenty minutes into the 9am screening of the film on Saturday, the screen suddenly went blank, the lights came up, and two grey-suited Festival employees shouted an explanation that I couldn’t scan with my limited French. A few minutes later, the lights went down, the film started up again. 18 minutes-ish later, another interruption. They must have been down to one projector. The interruptions continued, slicing Visage into groupings of three or four self-contained tableau at a time, arbitrarily demarcated and even more isolated from the whole than Tsai likely intended.

Because of this experience, I should obviously not be considered an authority on Visage, and probably shouldn’t even be attempting to write about it; I do not, by any stretch of the imagination, labor under the illusion that I “get” it. But there are images in this film that so continue to hanut me days later that I don’t think I’ll ever forget them: a simple kitchen problem evolving into a surreal disaster; Jean Pierre Leaud dozing off in a chair in the snow; Laetitia Casta’s face in extreme close-up as filmmakers discuss how to make her skin appear “translucent”; Nathalie Baye appearing from underneath an ornately set dinner table to join Fanny Ardant and Jeanne Moreau for a glass of wine. Even the film’s few redundancies to other films in competition are striking; you couldn’t get into Cannes this year without a sexual surprise, but Visage’s is different, because it stars Mathieu Almaric.

I have less goodwill towards Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void, an experience equally hard to shake, one that seems simultaneously easier to recommend to a general audience, and requiring of even more strenuous disclaimers. The story of Oscar (a barely-seen Nathaniel Brown) and Linda (a barely-clothed Paz De La Huerta), two young American siblings barely living in the grotty, multinational underbelly of Tokyo, he as a petty drug dealer and hallucinogen junkie, she as a dopey (if not always doped) stripper, Enter the Void is a work of radical point-of-view filmmaking, the camera assuming the position of Oscar’s head, the action filtered through his blinking eyes. The perspective becomes even more skewed when, early in the film, Oscar is shot and killed by police. Refusing to break a childhood promise to Linda that he’d never leave her even in death, Oscar’s spirit travels over his sister and —  after a stunning hour-long flashback to how they got to this point and an almost pointless slog through her life without him — into her and out of her. It may be safe to say that Enter the Void has the most contrived depiction of reincarnation of any film to force the point of view of an ovum about to be covered with ejaculate.

It cannot be denied that Noe is making an attempt to radically redefine the rules of cinema, and has succeeded in that he’s made a film that looks like nothing that you’ve ever seen. Comparisons to Kubrick have been made, but they barely scratch the surface; the only thing that comes close, for me, as reference to understanding what it feels like to watch this film, is to suggest that you imagine a two and a half hour live action remake of the flying stuff from Waking Life, with that film’s dimestore philosophy replaced with stoner TIbetan Buddhist claptrap, incest anxiety and a lot (a lot a lot a lot a lot) of naked, writhing Paz de la Huerta. That Enter the Void would be destined to become a college classic if anyone dared to release it is to essentially say two things: its innovation is entirely at the service of saying nothing worth contemplating whilst lucid, and that doesn’t really matter because it’s so visually seductive that it essentially flips the brain off switch for you. Untenably long and probably a fair bit more lurid than it has to be (a dish full of abortion waste is one Void I really didn’t need to Enter to grasp the viscera of the life-death continuum), Void nonetheless impacts the viewer physically. Which means, even it’s sort of bad, it has exponentially more impact than the bulk of the “good” films screened this year in the Cannes competition.