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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 rapist,
gloating over the battered body of Alex (Monica Bellucci), the young
woman he’s just brutally attacked before our eyes in a sickening seven-minute
single take. And of course it’s writer-director Noe speaking as well –
addressing the audience he’s just dared to endure the unendurable. His
is a cinema of ordeal, daring us to walk out, to look away, to
react, denounce, boycott, picket, whatever. The sensory assault
begins with the first frame of the opening titles, and continues to the
retina-blasting, eardrum-pounding coda 95 minutes later: not since Dario
Argento’s 1975 masterpiece Suspiria
has a film seemed so hell-bent on scourging our cinemagoing faculties.
And
it’s Argento’s Tenebrae
that Noe quotes with his ‘nauseating’ first shot – his camera swoops
and prowls all over the external surface of a building, tracing demented
arcs as though mounted on the back of a winged insect - a fly attracted
by sweat and shit, perhaps. We first visit a pair of middle-aged slobs
chewing the fat as they lie on a scuzzy bed in a grotty room (“Time destroys
all things,” sighs one), then we zoom down to the street, and then into
a gay S+M bar called The Rectum, where we see two men being escorted out
by police: Pierre (Albert Dupontel) under arrest, Marcus (Vincent Cassel)
semi-conscious on a stretcher.
What ‘follows’ is, in fact, what has gone before: the film “borrows” the structure
of Memento, with each
sequence a step back in time. So we see Pierre and Marcus – respectively
the former and current boyfriends of Alex in a frenzied chase through
the bowels of the Rectum in search of a certain notorious habituee. It’s
a quest that ends such in a shockingly violent fashion that it will signal
the first of several waves of audience walk-outs, although many censor
boards will probably apply the scissors to this scene, which far exceeds
anything in the oft-trimmed face-pummelling sequence of Fight Club.
But no-one can say they haven’t been warned of Irreversible’s content.
At Edinburgh, a printed sign posted outside the various screenings read
“Contains unremitting graphic scenes of extreme violence.” And yo walk
out at the rape scene – or the horrifying brutality that follows – does
a serious disservice to Bellucci the actress and Alex the character: we
only actually get to know her after her dehumanising assault –
a fact which can and should be debated over at length. Is the problem
that the revenge attack and the ensuing rape scene are too horrific? Can
a rape scene be anything but horrific? Rape and violence happen in
real life – shouldn’t they, therefore, be shown on film, in all its awfulness?
Would a sanitised, downplayed version be any less offensive? Or is the
problem that this stunningly serious subject is handled within what is,
admittedly, a gimmicky format?
To be fair to Noe’s detractors, he seems all too gleeful about putting his actors,
characters and audience through his film – just like Darren Aronofsky
in his similarly gruelling (though much less explicit) Requiem
For A Dream. But Irreversible is an undeniably powerful
experience – it makes nearly all this year’s other releases seem trivially
ineffectual in comparison. There’s much to be said for operating so audaciously
at, and beyond, the accepted limits of cinema – even if this pushing-back
of boundaries does have, in Noe’s case, a distinctly gratuitous feel.
There’s something cheap, for instance, about having Alex discovering she’s probably
pregnant mere hours before the assault – and it doesn’t help that Noe
rams home his various ‘messages’ so repeatedly. He shows us the poster
above Alex and Marcus’s bed: 2001 – A Space Odyssey, complete with
tag-line ‘The Ultimate Trip’, not once but three times, and we
get that ‘Time destroys all things’ motto at the end, just in case we’ve
forgotten the ‘moral’ of the piece.
But Noe does do some remarkable things with time in Irreversible,
which is almost entirely composed of very long takes – including the rape
sequence, where time really does seem to stand still as Alex squeals and
screams for help, reaching out her hand towards the camera: to the director
and/or the audience. And, like Memento, this is also a film about
memory: it’s amazing how many reviewers seem to think that Marcus, not
Pierre, is the one who actually carries out the Rectum-club revenge attack
– the two men’s motivations are significantly different.
And by gradually making each sequence more orthodox in its presentation, Noe
makes the earlier, more distorted moments seem like fragments of a very
bad dream. Irreversible is, quite deliberately, a ‘trip’ into hell
– a journey into dangerous, lethal zones of experience. Alex goes down
steps into the underpass where she’s raped, and her two male ‘avengers’
enter explicitly infernal regions when they ‘penetrate’ the Rectum. Irreversible
could just as well have been called ‘Enter the Void’ – reportedly
the title of Noe’s next film. Many people will, instinctively, shrink
back and seek safer cinematic territory. But anyone interested in what
film can do after over a century of existence – and what the next century
may bring – can scarcely afford to turn down the invitation.
August 18th, 2002
(seen 13th, Filmhouse Edinburgh – Edinburgh
Film Festival)
For the shorter
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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