2002; written and directed by Gaspar Noé; 93 mins
This is a clear cut case of a singular, powerful, provocative, brave and intelligently mounted film which I will never watch again. I have not yet seen 1975’s Salò because despite it being the most readily available of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s films, I wanted to watch a couple of his other works beforehand rather than dive right in to his most controversial film. Same with Gaspar Noé but there is another facet to this which is, I was scared to watch it. The first things you ever know about Irréversible are the rape scene and the fire extinguisher scene. Pretty quickly, the next thing you know is how utterly horrific both are and the legions of people who walked out/threw up. Very often, a film with that kind of reputation, through little to no fault of its own, cannot live up to it. Not so here.
Two men in varying states of undress sit alone in a tiny apartment bedroom and one, The Butcher from Noé’s debut feature I Stand Alone, confesses to having slept with his own daughter. Outside, the sound of police sirens get louder and there’s a commotion spilling out onto the street. The two men correctly (albeit, prejudicially) assume it’s coming from the gay club downstairs – ‘Rectum’. The camera carries on spiralling its way down to Rectum as two straight guys, Marcus and Pierre, tear through its crimson-flooded corridors, interrogating the patrons as they go. The duo are looking for “Le Tenia” (The Tapeworm) and their furious quest climaxes with Pierre stoving a man’s head in with a fire extinguisher.
Maybe now would be the time to mention that the story is told backwards. So I’ve already told you the ending because it comes first. I’m not sure where that leaves us in terms of spoiler warnings. Marcus and Pierre’s rampage in the club leads to their furious journey there, moving swiftly on to finding out who is responsible for putting Alex in a coma and where this scumbag is. Interestingly, tonally, the film does not start at its emotional peak and settle down from there, it actually starts angrily and builds towards the fibre-clawing awfulness of the central rape scene before dropping down into a much less difficult to deal with social tension at a party that Alex, Marcus and Pierre attend before she leaves alone and thereafter the film’s emotional register quietly subsides as happy times, romance and domesticity take over. Quite what the meaning of the film’s final, quiet passage has to say in relation to the end is still something of a mystery to me but perhaps it is simply in contention against the wish-fulfilment fantasy of turning back the clocks. Time and the course of our lives are inevitable so returning to a previous time only puts one on a repeat course for the same events. Me wishing to go back to a time before 2008’s financial crash would, in the philosophy of Irréversible, only make it all come round to be suffered a second time.
In his one-star Guardian review, Peter Bradshaw – a critic I really respect – referred to Noé’s style as “macho”, in particular referring to the film’s most shocking scenes. I don’t necessarily disagree with him but I don’t see it as a criticism. Certainly, in its earlier section when Marcus and Pierre are on the rampage, it’s meant to be “macho” (and obviously Bradshaw gets that). I don’t see it as a bad thing, though, because I’ve personally never seen the red mist of testosterone-fuelled vengeance portrayed so fearsomely and I use that word in its proper form – something of which to be afraid. The unstoppable performances of the actors and the deliberately nauseating visual and aural technique render this opening section a very scary experience. That early macho style is entirely apt as it later gives way to something which is calmer and sweeter (and I don’t just mean ‘feminine’).
I mentioned seeing Noé‘s other work before this and the most vital of those films was I Stand Alone, a relentless examination of closed-off, right-wing masculinity from which Irréversible is clearly an extension. The men here are cut from a similar mould to The Butcher, despite Marcus and Pierre being somewhat more ‘acceptably’ cosmopolitan and metrosexual. Peering out from beneath the shallows of their personalities, however, are the same self-pitying hypocrisies and violent lusts; The Butcher just didn’t bother to hide them. The accusation has been that Irréversible is homophobic, in part because of the scariness of the aforementioned early sequence set in a gay S&M club but is it perhaps that Noé has set the scene in a place that, up until very recently, straight-dominated society has deemed to be somewhere to be feared but in actual fact, the most dangerous people in the scene – crucially, as far as the audience is aware at that moment – are two straight, homophobic white guys? Of course, “Le Tenia” is in there and we will find out later what a despicable cunt he is but in that moment, Marcus and Pierre are just as dangerous, just as uncontrollable and almost as immoral as the man they’re pursuing. Of course, it cannot be brushed aside the fact that Le Tenia is seen in Rectum and many have said that the portrayal of him is thereby homophobic aswell because he brutally rapes and beats Marcus’ girlfriend, Alex, setting off the rampaging first act. I hesitate to be flippant or pedantic here for obvious reasons but Le Tenia evidently isn’t strictly homosexual – he’s at least bi, possibly pansexual – but regardless, neither is he strictly straight and that is a sticking point because the film thereby could be seen as portraying someone of alternative sexuality in a deeply negative light. Writing it like that, is to write oneself into a moral corner because it necessarily becomes harder to defend but I do feel that Le Tenia’s negative traits are far more tied up with his being male, in keeping with what I see as the film’s strong critique of alpha male culture. That’s just my feeling about it but it is also hard to divorce it from the confused cultural mess of the 90s-2000s era, which was situated neatly between two major movements of political correctness and had learned lessons from one and tired of it but didn’t really realise quite how far it had to go yet before the newer era in the 2010s forcibly obliged it in that respect. Irréversible‘s extremity is coming from a cultural milieu which also produced Little Britain‘s brand of lazy and deeply misguided attempts at ironic offensiveness (see also, Mock the Week). Tackling extreme subject matter head-on, these works were stepping stones which thought they were the enlightened, postmodern end-point but were largely made by white men who thought that being a left-wing white man was enough. Gapsar Noé is distinctly more aware and enlightened than those other examples and I don’t think he suffered much from the ‘ironic’ tendencies of that era (I did) and thusly I don’t have a problem with his work where I do with David Walliams blacked-up and in a fat suit. However, Irréversible perhaps allows itself too much grace regarding its self-appointed cosiness with the homosexual scene and maybe should’ve exercised more caution but is that not at odds with its extreme nature? I don’t know.
I’ve said this many times before on this blog but I have limited patience with the Godard/Iñárritu directing style of intellectual posturing: direction which deconstructs the film itself so as to make everyone notice the director. There are exceptions to this, when a film’s self-referentiality is in some way the filmmaker’s critique of themselves – Aronofsky’s mother! or Fellini’s 8½ being the most notable instances for me. Irréversible strays into this field too because for all his dark, Hellish view of the world, Gaspar Noé clearly never sees himself as above what happens in his films. Whilst I doubt he’s done anything like what the men in this film do, why he made this movie should inevitably raise the question of who it’s trying to provoke. At least, you’d have thought so, given how much the word “provocative” comes up in relation to the film. Who is Irréversible provoking? Men, clearly. The vast majority of women do not need to be provoked by the unbearable ten-minute rape scene that occurs halfway through and I think Noé knew that full well. If the last decade has taught us men anything (or should’ve done in many cases), it’s what a shocking percentage of women have been raped and quite how oblivious we have been to that subject and our lack of respect or concern for boundaries with women. I think it is the film’s intent that men are the ones who must look upon these scenes and consider their actions, whether completely illegal and morally reprehensible, nominally noble or somewhere in the in-between (I’m sure it must be a man who witnesses the rape and runs away). It should also be noted that Noé put star Monica Bellucci in charge of the choreography and blocking of the rape scene, thus it is a woman who has decided what to show and how far to go and that must surely be – mostly, at least – aimed at men. Much as I still need to think on the film’s latter half, like the scenes of brutality in The Last House on the Left, I trust Noé with those scenes because they are so starkly unbearable but imbued with so much emotion that there is no sense of mere intellectual detachment.
Irréversible is every bit the experience forewarned to me by people who’d seen it since I first heard of it years ago. It has lost none of its power and whilst I agree that there is a cack-handed narrative device to get Alex into the underpass (why would she take a stranger’s word for it that the underpass is safer?) it is pretty much flawless as a work of art-terrorism which takes a moral look at sexual violence and revenge in a way which makes no concessions to compartmentalised respectability and forces the viewer to deal with ongoing social issues. I’m not at all suggesting that other, less difficult ways of depicting such topics are wrong – only the day before I saw Katalin Varga, which has a graphic speech about a rape which was every bit as uncomfortable – but this film is decidedly singular in its approach. The uncompromising nature of the near-endlessly spinning camera, the low-frequency drone the soundtrack and Noe’s trademark reds and oranges which always give his films that sickly patina which looks gross to the touch – all combine to nerve-shredding effect, confronting us with the hideousness of these events through an in-your-face style. Crucially, for me, at no point did it come across as titillatory, smug or hectoring. Despite the fact that it was poking a finger at me, I never felt I was being talked down to or that the film was naive in its approach. It isn’t a perfect movie and I wouldn’t begin to say that if you don’t agree, you’re just easily offended or you don’t get it, man! It’s a divisive movie, evidently but by and large, it does what it set out to do and honestly I found it a far, far less problematic than some of the Giallo movies I’ve seen recently.
This review has been entirely in the service of trying to unpack the film for myself, it’s taken quite a long time to write and now my brain is scrambled, so my sincere apologies if it seems muddled or ill-thought-out. I will never watch it again.
p.s. – I hate this new editor on WordPress – it’s annoying. Therefore, this will be my last blog on Reading Films. Cheers.
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