Deplorable trash or amazing genius? The irreversible film
Tipper Gore, get out the big guns. ‘Irreversible’ is here, and he just landed a hell of a first punch. No amount of boycotts, pickets, bans, or insults could stop this scorching piece or moral certainty from landing, smoking, on the doors of video stores across the country. I’ve seen it myself. He walked to the store and picked it up, right off the shelf. That was three nights ago, and ever since, my mind keeps going back to it, spinning and closing on this or that aspect, unable to stop relating to something I wish I had never seen in the first place.
Yes, I thought I had seen it all. I’m one of those people who quotes ‘Reservoir Dogs’ lines at parties and recreates the infamous ‘crucifix at the crotch’ scene from ‘The Exorcist’, laughing all the time. I don’t believe in censorship. To put it very basic, I believe that all human beings have an inherent right to create whatever art we please, without restriction, as long as no one is physically injured, against their own will, in the process. It’s that belief that has made a movie like ‘Irreversible’ possible, and I find myself trying really hard not to choke on my own foot after that.
Argentine French director Gasper Noe, who created a slight stir with his irritating 1997 film ‘Seul Contre Tous’ (‘I’m Alone’), and has elicited similar responses with his two other smaller films ‘Sodomites’ (1998) and ‘Carne’ (1991) has managed to create something that is either an astonishing work of a monumental genius, or one of the most deplorable pieces of trash celluloid has ever printed, depending on who is watching, of course.
Believe me when I tell you this is the next step in desensitization. The film caused massive waves with its world premiere at Cannes in 2002, causing people to walk just twenty minutes after the film, with many more following less than halfway through. It experienced similar reactions with its North American premiere at the Telluride and Toronto film festivals, and just three nights ago, I did everything I could to hold on as I sat on the couch, feeling every second excruciating that passed while watching the movie. The infamous nine-minute rape scene unfolds in front of me for the first time.
Yeah kids, Irreversible has arrived, complete with deleted scenes, teasers, trailers, and all the other stuff that comes with the typical DVD package these days. The movie itself, however, is far from typical. Picked up by Lions Gate Films, the company that has grown from a producer of adolescent auteur films to a major Hollywood actor in the last seven years due to taking risks like this (‘American Psycho’, ‘Dogma’ and ‘House of 1000 Corpses’ is just three out of a long list of films that reeked of too much controversy for any of the ‘non-independents’ to touch) – the film’s official North American video release date was August 5, but came to my neck of the woods a little late.
To be completely honest, I had no idea what I was getting into. I hadn’t heard of it, but my observing partner for the night said he had been thoroughly warned of its graphic nature. What. He had seen ‘Faces of Death’, for crying out loud. Nothing could phase me.
Think again.
During the opening moments of the only crime scene in the film, which takes place about twenty minutes later, I felt my sixteen-year-old lungs fill up and tears rise to the surface of my eyes. I immediately stopped him and demanded to know if what we were seeing was tobacco, because if it was, I was no longer looking. My friend assured me it wasn’t, and after a few minutes of regrouping we continued, clinging to the knowledge that this was really a fantasy as my only protection. What was developed was a work of art that managed to shake my moral and ethical codes to the core, its non-existent equivalent in film and found only in Bret Easton Ellis’s super-controversial novel American Psycho.
The film, without rating, travels back in time, to Harold Pinter’s ‘Betrayal’ and Christopher Nolan’s ‘Memento’, beginning with the final sequence in which the camera pounces on the buildings of France uncontrollably, denying the viewer any real opportunity to get a grip of the foot on what is above or below and managing to create the actual physical sensation of vertigo. Along with this, Noe also employed the use of extremely low-frequency sound during this opening sequence to add to the effect. The entire film is shot in such a way as to give the appearance of no edits, creating a terrifyingly realistic and personal effect similar to that of stream of consciousness writing, another strange similarity to Ellis’s novel.
From there, he soon leads us to The Rectum, a gay S&M club, where he meets Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and his reluctant friend Pierre (Albert Dupontel) on a heated and continually confrontational search for the pimp known as La Tenia (The Tapeworm). . . The soundtrack pulses relentlessly as the camera continues to move, exposing us to an ongoing series of homosexual acts, revealed only in the blood red light inside the club. As the scene unfolds, you can literally feel the violence approaching. Once it happens, if you can actually sit through it, you may wonder if it will be okay.
The film continues from there to reveal the brutal rape and beating of Marcus’s girlfriend, Alex (Monica Bellucci), by La Tenia in an underground tunnel, also blood red. This is the climactic moment of the film, which fuels most of the controversy surrounding it. If you can get through this scene, the rest of the movie is very straightforward. For the first time since I saw ‘The Shining’ at age seven, I had to look away. I had to close my eyes and try not to listen. Noe’s camera no longer swoons into her previous stupor – she’s fixed on the scene in front of her, seemingly bolted to the ground as she unswervingly records what is arguably one of the most disturbing things you’ll ever witness on screen. .
And what is the point of all this? That’s a question you can’t help but have. This is a movie that doesn’t let you leave without an opinion, and maybe that’s the point. You get the feeling, as the movie continues its backward flow from the nauseating aftermath of the beginning to earlier scenes of a friendlier and ultimately cuddly nature, that Noe had a very succinct understanding of what he was doing when he built it this way. . To advance it in chronological order as a simple rape and revenge drama would be exploitation, without a doubt. The fact that the murder takes place in the first half hour of the film, with the motive still unknown, makes the violence even more terrifying. Only later is the reason shown to us, after we have already witnessed the vicious fate that befell the alleged perpetrator, so there is no lust for revenge, just a scathing question about the nature of morality and justice.
So does that make this all okay? Does that validate a nine-minute-long rape scene that could (and most likely will) children too young to understand the nature of art and censorship?
Before buying the novel ‘American Psycho’, I read some passages in the bookstore. I found it on a low shelf in the Chapters, along with other copies next to it, waiting to be picked up and read by anyone who might pass by. Once I had finished it, easily one of the most exploitative, graphic, misogynistic, and gratuitous works of popular literature ever written, the most unsettling thought I was left with was how easily I was able to pull it off. In Australia, the book comes wrapped in cellophane and you have to buy it without a prescription, showing identification before it is yours. Justified? I’d like to say yes, but once again, I don’t believe in censorship, in any way. If you have read ‘1984’, you will understand my tendency.
So here I am, shaken again for the first time in years by a work of art that has already found its place in the world and, now that I’ve seen it, in my own head. Last night I sat down to watch ‘Resevoir Dogs’ again with a couple of friends who, to my amazement, had never seen it before. During the first bloody scene, one of my friends lost a bit of color in his face and had to move further away from the television. Meanwhile, I sat there, feeling a strange sensation of anesthesia, as if a new layer of repaired tissue had accumulated around all my emotional sensors, and I wondered how numb these beliefs of mine could make me.
