As we chat – ranging over her life in New York, her father in Spain (“the most talented man I know, he could have been an artist”), and her enigmatic part in the new Gaspar Noé film, her most visible role to date – Paz frequently shifts her posture. An arm over a leg over an armrest; the other leg over the armrest and her head tilted back; both legs swung back and folded on the seat cushion, arms encircling them. It’s as if I’m watching a cat reposition itself over and over until it’s content. But that’s the curious thing about cats, you never know if they’re restless or if they simply enjoy the way their bodies move, which is elegant beyond compare. It wasn’t until later that I found out just how innately feline Paz is, when she mind-melded with the cat during our shoot.
     After years of fringe independent movies and Big Apple it-girl status, Paz is about to gain a much wider audience with the release of Enter the Void, French director Gaspar Noé’s latest cinematic provocation. It’s an unsavoury story about a creepily special relationship between a brother and sister. Following the loss of both their parents in a car accident when they are very young, the two make a pact to never leave each other. Ever. After a brief and apparently pained separation, Paz’s character is reunited with her brother in Tokyo, where she immediately falls in with the debauched demimonde that is his milieu, working as a stripper in a nightclub and becoming her boss’s regular fuck. These are two lost souls in a soulless world. And yet their spiritual bond persists, unbroken, into the afterlife.
     The movie contains the best — as in the most stupendously gorgeous and experientially true — depiction of a psychedelic trip in cinematic history. Seriously. It is worth seeing the film for this sequence alone. And there are other visual storytelling devices that are equally innovative and thematically brilliant, something that’s become a Noe specialty.