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IRREVERSIBLE
8/10
France 2002 : Gaspar Noe : 95 mins
 “Take
that in your face. Now I'm through with you." Thus spits a vicious
thug (Jo Prestia), gloating over the battered body of the woman (Monica
Bellucci) he’s just raped before our eyes in a sickening seven-minute
single take. And of course this is writer-director Noe speaking as well
– addressing the audience he dares to endure the unendurable.
Noe’s
followup to 1998’s controversially brutal Seul
Contre Tous is the story of Alex and Marcus – played by Bellucci
and Vincent Cassel, the golden couple of French cinema. When Alex is left
comatose after being assaulted in a bleak subway underpass, Marcus’s quest
for revenge results in a bystander being beaten to death with a fire-extinguisher
in a horribly convincing sequence near the start of the film. Because
this horror-story unfolds backwards, Memento-style
– we start in the (almost literal) pit of hell, and progress relentlessly
towards a savagely ironic ‘happy ending’ of Alex and Marcus’s domestic
bliss.
Be
warned: this is cinema as intense ordeal – almost gratuitously desperate
in its need to make us look away, walk out, denounce, boycott, picket,
whatever. The sensory assault begins with the first frame, and continues
to the retina-blasting, eardrum pounding strobe-coda 90-odd minutes later:
very few films have ever been so hell-bent on scourging its viewers’ basic
cinemagoing faculties. This is art operating at, and beyond, the accepted
limits of taste and decency. It must be seen by anyone who is both (A)
even remotely interested in the state of modern cinema, and (B) in possession
of a very strong stomach.
August 18th, 2002
(seen 13th, Filmhouse Edinburgh – Edinburgh
Film Festival)
For the longer
version of this review click here.
For all the
reviews from the 2002 Edinburgh Film Festival
click here.
by Neil
Young
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