monica bellucci, albert dupontel vincent cassel, philippe nahon
jo prestia
unfashionable observations rating: B
Irreversible tells the story of a beautiful middle-class woman named Alex who attends a party with her boyfriend Marcus, and an old friend, Pierre. At the party, she ends up having a fight with Marcus because he gets high on a line of cocaine. “You’re not 15,” she angrily retorts as he tries to curry her favor with a blank, drugged look in his eyes. As she’s about to leave, Pierre attempts to get her to stay a little while longer, as he hasn’t seen her in a while. Too distraught to be persuaded, she promises him that she will call him tomorrow, and promptly departs.
That promise is never fulfilled. After leaving the party alone, Alex meets with a gruesome destiny that will likely haunt viewers for years to come. As she walks down a lonely, blood-red, filthy subway tunnel on her way to catch the train back home, a man and a woman enter from ahead. They seem to be having some kind of argument, which ends in the man punching and pushing the woman against the wall of the tunnel. Alex watches in horror, and is torn between running away and helping the woman. When the man notices Alex watching, he lets the woman go and focuses his attention on Alex herself. As he begins to beat on Alex, the other woman sees an opportunity to run away and takes it. Only Alex and the man remain in the tunnel.
At this point in the movie, the audience is well aware of what is about to happen. This is because of the fact that the movie’s narrative structure is reversed, a la Memento. Indeed, the first few scenes show Marcus in a complete state of madness and despair, trying to find a man by the name of Le Tenia in a sordid gay nightclub. Pierre is at his side, trying to persuade him not to go any further, telling him that revenge is not the answer. Of course, at that point we have no idea why Marcus is trying to find Le Tenia, or who Le Tenia is, or why he’s in a gay nightclub, or why Pierre is talking about revenge. But as the movie goes backward in time with each scene, we learn that Le Tenia is the person responsible for brutally raping Alex, ultimately leaving her in a coma as a result.
So when we come upon the scene in the tunnel with Alex and Le Tenia, we know what is about to happen. At least, we think we do. The scene itself is so atrocious, so revolting, so raw and menacing, that nothing can prepare the audience for it—not even the reversed narrative structure. What we see is not just a rape; it is a dehumanization. Within the confines of that blood-red tunnel, all notions of morality, ethics, religion, life itself—all of these notions are rendered inadequate and even puerile. The viewer himself is violated when everything that provides meaning to one’s life is shown to be trivial when juxtaposed with the absolute terror of this scene. Director Gaspar Noe pulls the rug from under us, and leaves us without any grounding. We become dislocated both from our personal understanding of the world, and from the film itself.
Indeed, Irreversible is a movie about dislocation from life. This is made crystal clear in the events that transpire, which leave all the characters (and the audience) falling without hope, one-hundred leagues above an abysmal sea. The cinematography and filming style add even more to this feeling of vertigo. Most of the scenes are dark and grimy, and the camera constantly moves in circles, up and down, uncontrollably, capturing the action in snippets. All sense of order is completely lost, and is shown to be a fraud. Chaos reigns supreme, for it holds the card of “truth” in Noe’s nightmarish, disconcerting vision.
Noe’s ultimate message is an unmistakably negative one: Life is horrible—even more so than you imagined—and there is nothing you can do about it. I commend Noe for his audacity and clever filming technique. When we are sickened by the dizzying motions of the camera or by the depravity of the scenes, our physical reactions cohere with our emotional ones. Noe should be praised for that alone. Experiences of this kind are rare in film.
However, Noe’s nihilism is so pervasive throughout the film that the audience is never redeemed from what it has just experienced. It is only shocked and disgusted. As such, this film can be seen as the ultimate expression of rebellion, wherein all values are simply negated. This movie posits that values such as love, hope, ethics, and justice are laughably idealistic, and have no place in the real world of pain and suffering.
But rebellion itself is too easily accomplished, for unlike revolution, it does not require a solution to the problem at hand. This movie certainly makes a mockery of our most cherished values as human beings, but it doesn’t offer any solutions to the problems it so alarmingly identifies. It supposes the world to be one without solutions—an irreversible world headed straight to Hell. Perhaps that’s how the world really is. But this film is far from convincing us of that, for there is more to life than just hatred, rape, and death. If Noe believes he has shown us “truth” in Irreversible, then our appropriate response to his film should not be shock, but laughter.
I’d give Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible a B.
