No film review has perplexed me more, in more than two decades of doing this, than French director Gaspar Noe's fatalistic Irreversible.
This is the much reviled and much discussed "scandale" that launched itself at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival (it plays here in French with English subtitles). It co-stars the "hot" European married couple, Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel.
Irreversible contains both a graphic nine-minute rape scene of a woman by a man and a shocking murder in which a different man bashes in the head of a homosexual with a fire extinguisher, pulping both flesh and bone. There is an absolute minimum of nudity in the rape, but there is plenty of explicit, sexualized nudity in the sleazy gay club, The Rectum, where the murder occurs.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the film is discovering which despicable act most horrifies people who watch.
As for the most perplexing part of Noe's film, it is not the plot, which links the rape and murder (although not in a satisfying or just manner). Irreversible is ridiculously simple to piece together as a story of vengeance even though, in a casual mimicry of Memento, the story is told backwards. Once you have seen it all, you know it all. With this hindsight, it makes as much sense as random acts of violence ever can in contemporary society -- in this case, Paris.
The perplexing part, instead, is determining whether writer-director Noe has made some kind of flawed masterpiece or a piece of garbage. It is also possible that he has accomplished both extremes simultaneously.
In terms of bravado filmmaking, Noe certainly gets our attention. The film pulsates with energy and anger, like its characters, including male leads Cassel and Albert Dupontel. Noe, who also edited the film, shot it in a demented handheld technique that jumbles shots upside down and sideways and even at odd, disorienting angles.
Noe also gets our attention by examining the ability of an apparently mild-mannered man to murder another with such rage that it makes a mockery of civilization.
The same applies to the rape of the woman (the usually vivacious Monica Bellucci, also on screen now in Tears Of The Sun). The perpetrator is a pimp. Noe depicts, rather relentlessly, how there are men alive who feel compelled to brutalize and humiliate women to assert their own pathetic sense of power.
This disturbing issue is worth exploring. The question, of course, is whether it should be explored in this manner. It is easy to argue that Irreversible is homophobic, and mysogynistic, and more, making it as dangerous as the people it depicts. In the final analysis, that is how I personally feel about it.
(This film is rated R)
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