Reviews

IRREVERSIBLE
dir. Gaspar Noé, France
Lion's Gate Films

Shortly before the notorious climax of Gaspar Noé's previous film I Stand Alone, a warning appears on the screen declaring "You have 30 seconds to leave the theater" (the film then proceeds to count down all 30 seconds on-screen for those not checking their watches). Noé knows there is no way we would walk out at this stage, as the scene has to be experienced for the film to completely make sense. But unlike Michael Haneke's Funny Games-which mocks us for having been so easily manipulated by its violence, then punishes us for having been such voyeuristic, bloodthirsty fools-Noé's admonition does not indicate his interest in exploiting violence for the sake of challenging our responses to it, or punishing us for our voyeuristic impulse, á la Hitchcock. His is not merely an act of provocation, but an unsettling investigation of the dark side of human nature which does not compromise by showing us less than necessary.

The massive walk-outs from Noé's new challenge, Irreversible, at Cannes last year, and its subsequent unsympathetic reviews, remind me of the puritanical reaction to other yet-to-be-recognized masterpieces launched into a sea of moral panic at the beginning of the Seventies. The graphic, aestheticized violence of A Clockwork Orange forced Kubrick to defend himself against charges of fascism, and Sam Peckinpah's equally explicit Straw Dogs led 13 critics of the day to take an unprecedented step and write to The New York Times to complain about its unnecessary use of violence and double rape. Even in Ken Russell's The Devils, scenes of nuns in a nude orgy aroused enough interest to lead the official newspaper of the Vatican to pass comment. Considering the ongoing auto-pilot dismissal of disturbingly violent movies as merely "exploitative," Irreversible will probably be remembered, unfortunately, as just another whipping boy for reminding the film industry of its irresponsibility towards violence. By embracing a conservative critical approach, or by simply being morally and politically prejudiced, film critics can easily overlook the crucial ability of film to shock or disturb us. I find the chilled reception of Irreversible or even Spike Lee's latest masterpiece 25th Hour to be both upsetting and preposterous; are showing too much or shouting too loud a filmmaker's worst crimes?

Irreversible is presented as 12 supposedly single-shot sequences, each longer and more controlled than the one that preceded it (along with Abbas Kiarostami's Ten and Aleksandr Sokurov's Russian Ark, helping to usher in the era of the truly long take). Moving backwards in time, it opens with virtually unreadable closing credits, then throws us inside what seems like a dark tunnel. The camera shudders, lurches, and gyrates, its total darkness occasionally cut by infrared light and glimpses of naked men moaning and torturing each other. This hellish mayhem, we soon realize, is a gay S&M club named Rectum, through which two friends, Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and Pierre (Albert Dupontel) are barreling forward, raging and shouting, looking for a man named "El Tenia" (the Tapeworm). It is street justice they are after, trying to track the rapist of Marcus's girlfriend Alex (Cassel's real-life wife, Monica Bellucci) and get revenge. In the midst of this chaos, the camera pauses mercilessly on a man's skull being bashed repeatedly with a heavy metal object that might be a fire extinguisher. It seems like an inexcusable and inconsolable scene. Why are we watching this? As Noé strips us of all prepared responses and deprives us of the necessary background, our immediate response can only be that of repulsion. Then halfway through the film we see the victim, Monica Bellucci, being raped and beaten in an interminable nine-minute scene without a single edit and with the same rock-steady camera leering over every detail. It is grueling, harrowing, and appalling beyond words, but it also makes us go back and reconsider our emotional response to the horrifying scene earlier. As we now have a clearer sense of who is the victim and who is the victimizer, our irrational feelings of anger and horror, and our total sympathy for the victim, call for revenge. But since the narrative moves backwards, the terminal consequences of the act become less disturbing than the irreversibility of the film, its inability to satisfy our lust for vengeance when we most wish for it.

As the film moves on to the day it all began, the cinematography gets clearer, sharper, and much more vivid. Moving from violent chaos to romantic tranquility, Noé seriously disorients us at the outset, but brings progressive clarity as the story unfolds.

Seriously influenced by Kubrick (either implicitly by A Clockwork Orange or explicitly by 2001), Noé's aesthetics are consistent and mature, never really slipping into the easy trap of flamboyant mannerism. If we can overcome the horrors, the last three scenes are completely rewarding, as the final images transcend all that has come before and distill the pristine beauty in love, sex, and birth into extremely natural improvised long takes. Carefully constructed with layers and contrasts, Irreversible explores the morality of revenge through a deconstruction of narrative. But unlike, say, the overrated Memento, which failed to significantly develop the gimmick of moving backwards in time as anything beyond the mere formation of suspense and mystery, its narrative progression creates a dialectic between uninhibited violence and human intimacy, a trajectory which makes the ghastly scenes anything but exploitative.

Not for the squeamish or faint-hearted, Irreversible's main asset lies not in constructing a profound philosophical argument (such as the film's final statement, "Time destroys all things"), but in its ability to punch us right in our stomach and make us go through an emotional turmoil that affects us mentally and viscerally. Mesmerizing, daunting, and nauseating, Irreversible undermines our spectatorial equilibrium, and overwhelms us in ways that are both troubling and exhilarating. Isn't this what art is all about? -OHAD LANDESMAN