Irreversible

I have seen this film only once. It needs multiple viewings, I feel, to fully appreciate it's merit. This is something that will come in time but I felt it was only right to comment after my first impression. I instantly gave the film 10 out of 10, not because I overly enjoyed it (nigh on impossible) but because it shook me, at times, to my very core and affected me in a way that I cannot easily or fully describe. I can honestly say Irreversible is the most devastating piece of cinema I've ever witnessed. This isn't solely due to it's shocking content but more so the production as a whole and how it has been constructed and packaged. It truly is a work of art. Camera-work, lighting, colour (primarily gaudy, striking tones of red and orange) all combine in an unforgettable amalgam of brilliance. Featuring towering performances from Cassel, Belluci and Dupontel the film lurches backward in time depicting the events of a truly tragic night in the lives of three friends. Alex (Belluci) is brutally raped on her way home from a party and Marcus (Cassel) and Pierre (Dupontel) set off determined to wreak vengeance on the perpetrator. However, that is merely the plot. Admittedly quite a simple premise but the way it is played out is unforgettable. This is a film that everyone should and arguably needs to see as it is, for me, a milestone of modern cinema. Raw and unflinching, can you stomach it?

I'm a sucker for film-world hype--always have been, and probably always will be. When I stumble across a film that is so controversial it inspires both gasps of horror and cheers of praise, I flock to it. There is something intriguing about film's capacity to house unpleasantness, and just how far a director will go in conveying his message (it's always interesting to see whether or not they have a justified reason for the excess). "Irreversible," the backward-structured film from French shock auteur Gaspar Noe ("I Stand Alone") spins you out of control with as much regularity as his camera and characters will allow. It's a curious piece of work designed to provoke the audience--at the beginning, you're disoriented and confused (and, if you're like me, getting carsick from the deliberately erratic camera movements), and even repulsed by the actions of the unfamiliar characters hassling the patrons of a seedy homosexual club, a sequence that ends with a ghastly murder. Okay, then, so what? Clearly the rest of the movie is going to give us an explanation...but would the film have had a similar effect if it were told in a straightforward manner? Is the backward motion of "Irreversible" just a gimmick used by Noe (who is not immune from snobbery and pretension) to draw attention to his film? It's hard to say. Personally, I reject the notion of the reverse storyline being used as a gimmick, simply because of how deliberately the previous pieces fit (certain passages of dialog, particularly a discussion of orgasms that serves as a prelude to one of the most horrifying rape scenes in film history); Noe certainly wasn't asleep in his construction of the film. "Irreversible" displays the type of oppressive misanthropy (the dialog is loaded with racial and homophobic slurs) evidenced in Noe's "I Stand Alone" (the tale of an out-of-work butcher driven to madness by everyone around him), but then pulls back from the hard-edged violence to show a tender humanity that might be even more startling, since the film could have easily played itself for nothing but shock value the entire time. "Irreversible" is an unsettling conundrum that guides us through the highs and lows of the human condition--it pushes buttons of morality, shows in graphic detail what others would only suggest, and brings us out the end of the tunnel exhausted, invigorated, and breathless. A stunning film, somewhat hampered by its excessive dialog.

I just watched Irreversible....very difficult to watch. On the surface, the movie is very exploitive. It simultaneously arouses the two worst feelings possible: anger and helplessness. Below the surface, the movie may be more depressing than the rape of Monica Bellucci and the mistaken vengeance that it inspires. I think there's a deeper philosophical idea underlying this movie and it's not a happy one. At one point we see a poster of 2001: A Space Odyssey as the movie keeps segueing into the past. How is Irreversible related to 2001? Recall how Kubrick showed a very brief glimpse into the prehistory of humans at the beginning of 2001, before leaping far into the future Space Age? And in both time periods, Kubrick's work is imbued with a chronic pessimism about humanity. During the prehistoric era, our capacity to evolve and survive depended on the ability to create crude tools which we promptly used to exterminate rival gangs of pre-humans. In the Space Age our ability to break the bonds of Earth and explore Space depends on our ability to create more sophisticated tools: building and programming supercomputers, like HAL. But eventually that also winds up biting us in the ass. Noe, does the opposite, sort of. He shows segments of three individuals' lives but he starts in the Present and keeps going back further to the past. Noe seems intent on showing how what happens to humans is not just dependent on the past but, in fact, strictly determined by the past. At the end of the movie he has apparently gone all the way back to the Big Bang (Really intense flashing white light and sonic rumbling from the audio track). What is Noe getting at? Is it something more deeply pessimistic than even Kubrick dared imagine? What does Noe mean by the title "Irreversible" ?

Is it that conditions for the subsequent evolution of our universe were fixed by the initial conditions of the Big Bang and nothing can change what happens later; and the really radical idea that this strict determinism applies to human actions just as much as it does to, for example, star formation in some far-flung corner of the universe??? That humans do not in fact possess Free Will but are just part of the universe undergoing changes by responding to forces and psychological pressures which all follow precisely from what has happened in the past?? If this is what Noe is conveying, it is very very DARK in a way that goes beyond Kubrick: we're not just violent and hedonistic, we really don't have any choice in the matter. For Noe, being "One With The Universe" isn't a pop slogan from the 60's accompanied by warm feelings of emotional wellbeing; it's a stark physical fact involving a collapse to nihilism. As Time destroys everything, maybe there are no good or bad deeds, just simply "deeds", or as a physicist would call them, "events". Noe = Nietzsche ??: Psychologically, intelligent beings can't evolve in any other direction: the struggle for existence forces us to conceive of ourselves as Free. One of necessary preconditions in the struggle for survival may be intellectual Error. Our perception of ourselves as free sentient inner-directed Agents: just a little joke played on us by the universe as it bends us over and we take it in the Rectum.

"Irreversible": the universe as one big Process that, once set in motion, will evolve according to it's own laws and cannot be changed even by human awareness of this Process since our awareness is just one aspect that's been set in motion. Anyway, I hope this isn't what Noe intended because it's very depressing. And even if Noe didn't intend this, maybe it's true nonetheless. Scary thought.

Gaspar Noé's Irreversible doesn't seek comfort or catharsis. It disorients, suffocates, and refuses to let up. The relentless rotating shots were meant to trap the viewer in chaos, but for me, they were more exhausting than immersive. Instead of pulling me deeper, they pushed me away, making the experience feel more frustrating than absorbing. It was overwhelming in a way that felt more like a test of patience than a narrative choice.

Nothing is softened or made palatable. Some scenes are so deeply disturbing they feel impossible to endure, but that is the intent. Noé refuses to let the worst of humanity be ignored, dragging reality into the light where it cannot be brushed aside. The reverse chronology settled in naturally after a while. If anything, it made the tragedy hit harder. Watching time strip away the horror, revealing warmth and love underneath, carried a quiet cruelty. Within a single day, life offers both its most beautiful and most devastating moments, and there is no way to change the order in which they arrive.

When his girlfriend Alex is brutally raped in an underpass, boyfriend Marcus and Alex's ex-boyfriend Pierre are approached by a couple of criminal types who claim to know who did it and lead Marcus on the path to revenge via hookers and a man in a brutal gay club known as the Rectum.

I shan't waste my time or yours by writing more of a plot to this film than that because this is all quite thin stuff. Normally I find myself gradually engaged by a film as it develops characters and stories however with Irréversible I was gripped immediately but the effect worked in reverse, just like the film. Others have asked why this film is told backwards, with some waxing lyrical about the film demonstrating the nature of actions and consequences. I don't buy this and I almost believe that the film is structured this way because Noé knows that his film is not good enough to engage the audience with the development of the story and characters to the point where they would still care by the end. Whereas, by starting with his biggest and most impacting sequences he has preventing the audience thinking "this is going nowhere" by putting us right where it is going to.

Of course what this means is that the film genuinely has nowhere to go to because the developmental issue is still there – albeit the need to see roots rather than branches. With this there is nothing and I felt myself becoming more and more disappointed with the film as it went on as it seemed to offer nothing but missed potential. Unlike Memento (which was a thriller with the reason being to find out what caused the end), Irréversible's ending is an act of violence and revenge that, in essence occurs out of bad fortune rather than a series of events that are worth holding out for. With this in mind the focus comes more on the characters and their relationships to find a reason to make the impacting opening to the film feel that much more impacting. Sadly it does fall down and despite some interesting stuff that might have gone somewhere (if not to the actual crime), themes of sexual intimacy, differences in men and women and so on are just suggested but never delivered upon and my interest and respect for the film waned frighteningly quickly.

It is a terrible shame because the film had initially won me over quickly. With the first shots of spinning camera, "irrelevant" men and disorientating delivery I prepared myself to hate this film and slate it for being pretentious. This feeling didn't subside much as we were thrown into a gay club ending with an intensely brutal scene of violence that quite sickened me. The reason for this is almost the following scene where we see the beautiful and classy Alex brutally and meaninglessly sodomised on the floor of a dirty underpass for no other reason than being in the wrong place at the wrong time and the wrong sex. With my eyes at the time I found these scenes to be quite brilliant but finding out later there was nothing beyond them I take a dimmer view. In his defence, Noé's sequences should not be mentioned in the same breath as the recent Holly wood trend for torture porn because there is nothing erotic here. The rape scene in particular is disturbing, sickening and based on violence, certainly not sex, attraction or arousal. Some comments on IMDb have disturbed me and shown that some people will still "enjoy" these scenes – one particular comment saying "fans of rape movie will appreciate" the sequence I felt was in particular poor taste. However for me it is as effective as it is unpleasant, Noé does not adopt the angles, style or nudity of pornography and indeed leaves the camera on the floor and lets the actors deliver an experience that is undeniably cruel and wrong. Viewers who chose to get off on that will do so however for those of us not stimulated by the violent degradation of another the effect will be harrowing.

The cast are good where they are caught up in things. Cassel is convincing in his revenge scenes but has less to work with in the later (earlier) scenes. Likewise Bellucci is amazing in her key scene; utterly convincing and heart-wrenching in her agony and I can only imagine how difficult it was for her to shoot. Dupontel is interesting but his performance would have benefited from going from innocence to violence and not the other way round. Prestia is a convincing human version of Satan, who is sickeningly real. Noé's direction is impressive even if his ability as writer is not. His camera earlier on matches the frantic violent mood of his characters but gradually calms down. Quite what he is saying with where the film goes or how it ends is beyond me but by then he had done sufficiently little to convince that I shouldn't worry myself too much.

Overall an impacting "experience" film that starts out with the potential to be a challenging and difficult art film. However with nothing past these scenes of significant value, the backward telling just seems like a way of having the "big" scenes before losing the audience, rather than afterwards and for all my appreciation and admiration for his intense and creative technique as director, I found Noé the writer to be lacking. In summary I'm not sure if I liked this or not or if it is worth seeing but it is certainly an experience that should be seen by those looking for a diverse taste of cinema whether it is "enjoyable" or not.