Shocking and graphic, but not much else Some minor spoilers in this review. But the power of this technique-heavy French film, wasted power if you ask me, is in the way it is shot, not in the story.
We start with a murder, and proceed backwards in time. Got that? The first scene in the film shows you the end of the story, the next scene shows what happened just before the end, and so on, until the end of the film, when you reach the beginning of the story. Why this odd technique? Who knows.
The murder is terrifically violent, brutal and graphic, accompanied by teeth-grating sound effects that truly put the viewer on edge. I guess being able to pull off this kind of emotional manipulation is an accomplishment of sorts, though not one I find especially valuable. In addition to the murder, there is an extraordinarily brutal, and completely unerotic, rape sequence. However politically incorrect it may be to say so, I have found some rapes I have scene in movies to be exciting and erotically charged; this one was just gruesome and cruel, and also way overlong.
Underlying all of this is a prosaic tale of a romantic triangle, involving three rather uninteresting people. The girl has thrown over the intelligent, sensitive guy for the animalistic fellow with whom she has more satisfying sex. There is a little bit of exploration of this dynamic, but nothing noteworthy. The rape and murder, which are the film's centerpiece and reason for being, come upon these people strictly by chance, and have nothing at all to do with their interrelationships. The story, in short, lacks coherence. What we have here are segments of shocking violence grafted onto a really dull love story, for no apparent reason.
A couple of entertaining touches -- the murder occurs at a gay bar hilariously called "The Rectum", for which our protagonists have feverishly searched by screaming out "Where is the Rectum? Take me to the Rectum!" to anyone passing by. In the same scene, there is a shamelessly racist but still-hysterical exchange between an Oriental cab driver and his passenger.
See this film if you want to feel emotionally brutalized. Don't see much point in seeing it otherwise.