Irreversible

Irreversible – Gasper Noe’s 2002 film about a rape and the revenge it induces is an example of a movement called the French New Brutality. The film is disturbing and ultimately immoral, raising many interesting questions. In summary, the film’s plot is very similar to an earlier, and much better, picture, also condemned for its cruelty in its day, Bergman’s The Virgin Spring. A young woman is brutally raped and beaten. Her boyfriend takes revenge on her assailant. There really isn’t much more to the picture. Noe recognizes that his plot is thin to the point of vanishing. Accordingly, he imposes a distancing gimmick – the film is shown in sequences that begin with the aftermath of the revenge and, then, proceeds in reverse chronology to an image of the rape victim, blissfully unaware of what will befall her later, sunbathing on a green expanse of lawn and, this being a French film, portentously reading a book about time. If the film were to proceed in chronological fashion, the viewer would reasonably ask: what is the point of this? And why am I being asked to witness these horrible events? But since the picture proceeds backward in the fashion of Memento, the essential vacuity of the project is concealed and the viewer’s involvement in decoding the images, which are frequently extremely difficult to decipher, seems designed to prevent the spectator from feeling moral qualms at the entire questionable enterprise until it is, in effect, too late. Pretentious gimmicky, accordingly, is used to disguise the fact that the film is, at heart, a monstrous version of a typical exploitation picture – something on the order of Last House on the Left or I Spit on Your Grave tricked-out in obfuscating avant-garde stylistics. Noe is anxious to make the film as ugly and transgressive as possible. The picture is shot on 16 mm in sequence shots – each sequence lasts the length of a continuous shot. The rape scene, which is interminable, is filmed from a single static camera placed at mid-distance from the protagonists. The sequences in a gay sex club, picturesquely called The Rectum, are shot in almost complete darkness, the camera swaying in a vertigo-inducing oval trajectory that is as disorienting and uncommunicative as possible. (Presumably, Noe recognized that the SM activities of the denizens of The Rectum could not be shown on screen and were most effectively represented by glimpses, peeks as it were into the inferno. Noe’s attitude about gay sex makes Dante’s seem liberal and benign. If Noe had shown what was happening in The Rectum in clear light and with lucidly presented camera angles, no doubt, the film would have earned some kind of reputation as pornography – or, more probably, the stuff going on in The Rectum would have seemed merely ridiculous or absurd, like most sex acts, an effect that would have undercut Noe’s scrupulously depicted hellishness.) Irreversible aims to induce controversy by promoting three particularly transgressive points. First, Noe suggests that all sex is akin to rape and that on the erotic continuum, romantic love is blood-brother to the horrific anal rape inflicted on Irreversible’s heroine. Everyone in the movie seems obsessed with anal sex and there is immense amounts of dialogue about fucking people in the ass, buggering one’s enemies, etc. The film implausibly links the beautiful Monica Bellucci with the thuggish Vincent Cassel, an odd couple if ever there was one, and Cassell importunes her to allow him to bugger her – perhaps, she has her period, a claim she makes which seems to conflict with her statement at one point that she is pregnant. The movie suggests that it’s a short step from flirtation to forced sodomy, a questionable proposition, I think, but one worth pondering. Second, Noe does everything in his power to force a conversation about whether the rape victim somehow provoked the attack by her apparel – this is a Neanderthal point but one that Noe compels by the way that he dresses Bellucci. She is wearing a skin-tight white dress that reveals her nipples with complete clarity and that it is very hard to imagine any woman wearing in public. Furthermore, Noe’s decision to cast a famously beautiful and sensual actress in the role of the rape victim nudges the film perilously close to pure exploitation. The movie would have an entirely different meaning and emotional effect if the rape victim was modestly dressed and plain-looking. Noe obviously wants to cause, at least, certain of his viewers to misunderstand his picture. Finally, the concept of the rapist as a SM-devoted homosexual seems utterly bizarre and stains credibility to the utmost. Noe grasps this problem and shows his loathsome rapist initially beating up a luckless transsexual prostitute – but there seems to be some level of visceral loathing for homosexual activity, particularly anal intercourse, that improbably motivates this film. (Reviews tells me that Noe intends the audience to understand that the guy whose faces is smashed to pulp in the revenge climax of the film is an innocent bystander, someone who happens to be masturbating next to the rapist in the hellish gloom of the Rectum – if this is the case, most critics don’t seem to have grasped this point and the audience with whom I watched the film retroactively interpreted the gruesome death of the man in the gay bathhouse as representing his just retribution for raping and smashing in the pretty features of the film’s poor heroine. It’s at this point that aspects of the film have to accused of actual incompetence. If Noe wanted us to know that the wrong man was killed, a familiar trope in revenge melodramas, then, he is obliged to make this more clear in his staging.) I can’t recommend this film but it’s undeniably powerful and certainly raises a number of important issues.