Tom Foster
05-19-2003, 10:29 AM
The French, eh? They can always be relied upon to make films about sex and violence that make their English language counterparts look decidely anaemic. There have been several notable French films in this field of late: BAISE-MOI (2000, Coralie/Despentes), TROUBLE EVERY DAY (2001, Claire Denis), ROMANCE (1999, Catherine Breillat) and of course Gaspar Noé’s SEUL CONTRE TOUS (1998, ‘I Stand Alone’), the feature length follow-up to CARNÉ, an award-winning and controversial short film about an alienated horse-meat butcher. IRRÉVERSIBLE is the latest offering from Noé, and those already familiar with his earlier films will have a good idea of what to expect from it...
IRRÉVERSIBLE is one of those films where you really should heed the warnings about 'content that is likely to offend'. It’s one of those films that in later years will likely be held in the same light as I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (1979, Meir Zarchi) and watched by teenage boys as a kind of rite of passage. Before I go any further I should warn you that it’s impossible to discuss the film without major spoilers, so don’t read any further if you don’t want to know what happens.
The first thing you should (and probably already do) know about the film is that it is told backwards, á la MEMENTO (2000, Christopher Nolan). Obviously, it’s impossible to genuinely show a film backwards, as the dialogue would be unintelligible. What we get instead is a number of scenes, shown in reverse order (i.e. in the opposite order to that in which they occur chronologically), but played normally, so that each scene explains the preceding one. In other words, you won’t fully understand what happens at the beginning of the film until you’ve watched the whole film (and then thought about it for a good while afterwards). The second thing you should know is that it contains two extremely unpleasant and difficult to take scenes, which I guess is likely to encourage people to want to see it for all the wrong reasons.
The film opens with the closing credits, which run backwards up the screen. A camera spins wildly around the outside of a building. In a room, two men (one of them Philippe Nahon, the butcher from CARNÉ/SEUL CONTRE TOUS) discuss life. “Time ruins everything,” opines Nahon’s character. Sirens approach the building and grow louder. We move below, to the outside of the ‘Rectum’ club, a gay S&M joint. A man is wheeled out on a stretcher and into an ambulance, all the while being shouted at by a group of men. In the next scene, Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and Pierre (Albert Dupontel) arrive at the club and enter. The inside is dark, music pounds and all sorts of weird men haunt the shadows. Marcus is out of control, frantically trying to locate a person called ‘Le Tenia’ (“the tapeworm”). We follow the two men through the bowels of the hellish club, whilst Pierre tries to restrain Marcus. Eventually Marcus finds someone who acknowledges that he knows the man he is searching for. He leads Marcus to two men, neither of whom respond to Marcus’ questioning. One of the men attempts to leave and Marcus attacks him. The man fights back, snapping Marcus’ arm and preparing to sodomise him. Suddenly, Pierre appears and smashes the man in the face with the base of a fire extinguisher. Pierre then continues to pulverise the man’s head with the extinguisher with a series of sickening blows.
The following scenes show how Pierre and Marcus got to be in this position. They emerged from a party earlier in the evening, to see a woman being taken to hospital on a stretcher, having been raped and horribly beaten up. The woman is Alex (Monica Bellucci), Marcus’ girlfriend. The police question them, and they are approached by some local low-lives who offer to help Marcus and Pierre track down the person responsible and take revenge. We follow them as they frantically try to find out who was responsible and learn of "the tapeworm in the Rectum". Next we find out how Alex ended up in that state – she left the party before Marcus and Pierre and made her way through a dingy underpass. As she walked through, she passed a man and a woman fighting. Suddenly the man turned on her, taunting her with a knife then brutally sodomising her, before beating her in a frenzy. The following scenes show us how the three came to be at the party, and what the relationship was between Alex and Pierre. The final scene in the film is of Alex lying on a towel in a park, contemplating her life beneath a glorious blue sky.
Perhaps the most difficult thing about IRRÉVERSIBLE is the extremely confrontational camera style that is employed for the first third or so of the film’s 93 minute runtime. The camera spins, rotates, turns upside down, moves around the characters constantly, making it nearly impossible to work out what’s going on. In addition to this, the action takes place in near-darkness, lit only by a red glow. There is also a throbbing, urgent noise on the soundtrack, all of which combine to give the opening scenes a truly nightmarish feel. I can imagine that seeing the film in a cinema would enhance this even more – even watching at home on a widescreen TV, the images left me feeling dizzy and slightly nauseous. Noé uses the same super-wide framing as in his previous films, and this also adds to the feeling of spatial dislocation. The back-to-front narrative isn't merely a gimmick here though - by putting the viewer through the violence and rape scenes before filling in the back story, Noé forces them to think about what they're seeing and removes the element of 'payoff' that the scenes would have had if included at the end of the film, as in a conventional narrative. It also imbues the later scenes between Alex and Marcus with a real warmth and intensity that would not be so apparent if viewed in chronological order.
The scene in which Pierre smashes the guy in the club’s head repeatedly with the fire extinguisher is incredibly brutal and very hard to watch without flinching, and the rape scene is easily one of the most unpleasant things ever committed to celluloid. By this point (about halfway through the film) the viewer is left reeling, upset by the images they have witnessed, but also literally dazed, thanks to the hypnotic soundtrack and constantly wheeling camerawork. The remaining scenes are much gentler, gradually bringing the viewer back to their senses and instilling a false sense of comfort by showing happy, tender scenes, which in fact occur before the brutal scenes already witnessed. Noé uses this device most cruelly, as witnessed by the scene in which Alex takes a pregnancy test. We also know by the time Alex is undergoing her ordeal that she is not going to be avenged – the tapeworm is the man who was standing next to the guy who ends up having his head pummelled in the Rectum.
On the way to the party, Alex tells Pierre and Marcus about a book she’s reading which proposes that the “future is already completely decided”. She also has a dream about being in a dark tunnel that “broke into two pieces”, apparently presaging what will happen to her in the underpass. The circular motion of the camera begins to take on a meaning, reinforced in the film’s final scene: the characters themselves are moving through life powerless to change or escape their fates, each action they take serving only to seal their fates more completely. The rape scene, taken in chronological order, echoes various points in the preceding scenes; Pierre taunts Alex at length about his inability to bring her to orgasm during their marriage; Marcus tells Alex that he would like to “fuck her in the arse”; Alex tells Marcus that she is not “a thing” to be used or owned.
Most of the scenes in the film are single takes, some over 10 minutes in length. The acting is excellent and one has to wonder how on Earth Noé persuaded Bellucci to take the role of Alex. The scenes between Bellucci and Cassel have a genuine warmth to them and that peculiarly European frankness (both are completely naked much of the time) that makes them so much more believable than similar scenes in American films. Bellucci and Cassel were apparently married at the time that the film was made, and this makes these scenes even more realistic and also makes it easier for us to believe that a woman like Alex would be involved with Marcus who, based upon what we see of him during the film, is a complete arse. Indeed, all of the male characters in the film behave like animals, with the exception of Pierre, Alex’s former husband.
Ever the provocateur, Noé’s film is likely to offend practically everyone. It would be easy to level charges of homophobia, misogyny, racism and over-explicitness at Noé – and I don’t suppose he’d care a bit. As with his preceding ‘horse butcher’ films, Noé unquestionably wants to offend you and goes out of his way to do so. Even the rape scene is difficult to defend, despite being truly horrific and completely lacking in any kind of sexual frisson for the viewer. By having Alex wear the most clinging of mini dresses for this encounter (her nipples are very prominent, to say the least), Noé sexualises and objectifies her in exactly the way one would expect from an exploitation director, or a pornographic film. The problem is: what exactly does the film have to say? What is its point? We know rape is a horrible thing, we know that we shouldn’t allow thoughts of revenge to rule our emotions, we know that violence is dehumanising – and we don’t really need Noé to point any of this out so graphically. The film ends as it began (or begins as it ended) with the words ‘Le Temps Detruit Tout” (time destroys everything), reinforcing the circular theme but not making Noé’s philosophy any clearer. Nihilistic, pretentious, shocking, gratuitous – IRRÉVERSIBLE is all these things. Yet it is also powerful, provocative, technically accomplished and strangely uplifting.
Amazingly, the film was passed uncut by the BBFC here in the UK, and is due to be released on DVD imminently.
IRRÉVERSIBLE is one of those films where you really should heed the warnings about 'content that is likely to offend'. It’s one of those films that in later years will likely be held in the same light as I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (1979, Meir Zarchi) and watched by teenage boys as a kind of rite of passage. Before I go any further I should warn you that it’s impossible to discuss the film without major spoilers, so don’t read any further if you don’t want to know what happens.
The first thing you should (and probably already do) know about the film is that it is told backwards, á la MEMENTO (2000, Christopher Nolan). Obviously, it’s impossible to genuinely show a film backwards, as the dialogue would be unintelligible. What we get instead is a number of scenes, shown in reverse order (i.e. in the opposite order to that in which they occur chronologically), but played normally, so that each scene explains the preceding one. In other words, you won’t fully understand what happens at the beginning of the film until you’ve watched the whole film (and then thought about it for a good while afterwards). The second thing you should know is that it contains two extremely unpleasant and difficult to take scenes, which I guess is likely to encourage people to want to see it for all the wrong reasons.
The film opens with the closing credits, which run backwards up the screen. A camera spins wildly around the outside of a building. In a room, two men (one of them Philippe Nahon, the butcher from CARNÉ/SEUL CONTRE TOUS) discuss life. “Time ruins everything,” opines Nahon’s character. Sirens approach the building and grow louder. We move below, to the outside of the ‘Rectum’ club, a gay S&M joint. A man is wheeled out on a stretcher and into an ambulance, all the while being shouted at by a group of men. In the next scene, Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and Pierre (Albert Dupontel) arrive at the club and enter. The inside is dark, music pounds and all sorts of weird men haunt the shadows. Marcus is out of control, frantically trying to locate a person called ‘Le Tenia’ (“the tapeworm”). We follow the two men through the bowels of the hellish club, whilst Pierre tries to restrain Marcus. Eventually Marcus finds someone who acknowledges that he knows the man he is searching for. He leads Marcus to two men, neither of whom respond to Marcus’ questioning. One of the men attempts to leave and Marcus attacks him. The man fights back, snapping Marcus’ arm and preparing to sodomise him. Suddenly, Pierre appears and smashes the man in the face with the base of a fire extinguisher. Pierre then continues to pulverise the man’s head with the extinguisher with a series of sickening blows.
The following scenes show how Pierre and Marcus got to be in this position. They emerged from a party earlier in the evening, to see a woman being taken to hospital on a stretcher, having been raped and horribly beaten up. The woman is Alex (Monica Bellucci), Marcus’ girlfriend. The police question them, and they are approached by some local low-lives who offer to help Marcus and Pierre track down the person responsible and take revenge. We follow them as they frantically try to find out who was responsible and learn of "the tapeworm in the Rectum". Next we find out how Alex ended up in that state – she left the party before Marcus and Pierre and made her way through a dingy underpass. As she walked through, she passed a man and a woman fighting. Suddenly the man turned on her, taunting her with a knife then brutally sodomising her, before beating her in a frenzy. The following scenes show us how the three came to be at the party, and what the relationship was between Alex and Pierre. The final scene in the film is of Alex lying on a towel in a park, contemplating her life beneath a glorious blue sky.
Perhaps the most difficult thing about IRRÉVERSIBLE is the extremely confrontational camera style that is employed for the first third or so of the film’s 93 minute runtime. The camera spins, rotates, turns upside down, moves around the characters constantly, making it nearly impossible to work out what’s going on. In addition to this, the action takes place in near-darkness, lit only by a red glow. There is also a throbbing, urgent noise on the soundtrack, all of which combine to give the opening scenes a truly nightmarish feel. I can imagine that seeing the film in a cinema would enhance this even more – even watching at home on a widescreen TV, the images left me feeling dizzy and slightly nauseous. Noé uses the same super-wide framing as in his previous films, and this also adds to the feeling of spatial dislocation. The back-to-front narrative isn't merely a gimmick here though - by putting the viewer through the violence and rape scenes before filling in the back story, Noé forces them to think about what they're seeing and removes the element of 'payoff' that the scenes would have had if included at the end of the film, as in a conventional narrative. It also imbues the later scenes between Alex and Marcus with a real warmth and intensity that would not be so apparent if viewed in chronological order.
The scene in which Pierre smashes the guy in the club’s head repeatedly with the fire extinguisher is incredibly brutal and very hard to watch without flinching, and the rape scene is easily one of the most unpleasant things ever committed to celluloid. By this point (about halfway through the film) the viewer is left reeling, upset by the images they have witnessed, but also literally dazed, thanks to the hypnotic soundtrack and constantly wheeling camerawork. The remaining scenes are much gentler, gradually bringing the viewer back to their senses and instilling a false sense of comfort by showing happy, tender scenes, which in fact occur before the brutal scenes already witnessed. Noé uses this device most cruelly, as witnessed by the scene in which Alex takes a pregnancy test. We also know by the time Alex is undergoing her ordeal that she is not going to be avenged – the tapeworm is the man who was standing next to the guy who ends up having his head pummelled in the Rectum.
On the way to the party, Alex tells Pierre and Marcus about a book she’s reading which proposes that the “future is already completely decided”. She also has a dream about being in a dark tunnel that “broke into two pieces”, apparently presaging what will happen to her in the underpass. The circular motion of the camera begins to take on a meaning, reinforced in the film’s final scene: the characters themselves are moving through life powerless to change or escape their fates, each action they take serving only to seal their fates more completely. The rape scene, taken in chronological order, echoes various points in the preceding scenes; Pierre taunts Alex at length about his inability to bring her to orgasm during their marriage; Marcus tells Alex that he would like to “fuck her in the arse”; Alex tells Marcus that she is not “a thing” to be used or owned.
Most of the scenes in the film are single takes, some over 10 minutes in length. The acting is excellent and one has to wonder how on Earth Noé persuaded Bellucci to take the role of Alex. The scenes between Bellucci and Cassel have a genuine warmth to them and that peculiarly European frankness (both are completely naked much of the time) that makes them so much more believable than similar scenes in American films. Bellucci and Cassel were apparently married at the time that the film was made, and this makes these scenes even more realistic and also makes it easier for us to believe that a woman like Alex would be involved with Marcus who, based upon what we see of him during the film, is a complete arse. Indeed, all of the male characters in the film behave like animals, with the exception of Pierre, Alex’s former husband.
Ever the provocateur, Noé’s film is likely to offend practically everyone. It would be easy to level charges of homophobia, misogyny, racism and over-explicitness at Noé – and I don’t suppose he’d care a bit. As with his preceding ‘horse butcher’ films, Noé unquestionably wants to offend you and goes out of his way to do so. Even the rape scene is difficult to defend, despite being truly horrific and completely lacking in any kind of sexual frisson for the viewer. By having Alex wear the most clinging of mini dresses for this encounter (her nipples are very prominent, to say the least), Noé sexualises and objectifies her in exactly the way one would expect from an exploitation director, or a pornographic film. The problem is: what exactly does the film have to say? What is its point? We know rape is a horrible thing, we know that we shouldn’t allow thoughts of revenge to rule our emotions, we know that violence is dehumanising – and we don’t really need Noé to point any of this out so graphically. The film ends as it began (or begins as it ended) with the words ‘Le Temps Detruit Tout” (time destroys everything), reinforcing the circular theme but not making Noé’s philosophy any clearer. Nihilistic, pretentious, shocking, gratuitous – IRRÉVERSIBLE is all these things. Yet it is also powerful, provocative, technically accomplished and strangely uplifting.
Amazingly, the film was passed uncut by the BBFC here in the UK, and is due to be released on DVD imminently.