Irreversible Review
by Harvey S. Karten (harveycritic AT cs DOT com)March 4th, 2003
IRREVERSIBLE
# stars based on 4 stars: 2
Reviewed by: Harvey Karten
Lions Gate Films
Directed by: Gaspar Noe
Written by: Gaspar Noe
Cast: Monica Bellucci, Vincent Cassel, Albert Dupontel, Philippe Nahon, Jo Prestia
Screened at: Preview 9, NYC, 3/3/03
In Gregor Jordan's "Buffalo Soldiers," the writer-director posits the theory that violence is caused by boredom. True enough, but that's just part of the picture. Human beings have a major need for revenge when their honor, their property, their loves ones are humiliated and worse. "Irreversible" pushes the envelope past "Buffalo Soldiers," said by some viewers to be one of the most violent pictures of all time, the sort of film which supports the TNT cable ad now seen on bus stops all over town, "You can't look...you can't look away."
While stories including intense violence have been a part of the world's culture since ancient times, the Greeks always took their best shots off stage. Clytemnestra does in Agamemnon away from our prying eyes and Medea takes care of her philandering husband beyond our vision just before making her escape on a deus ex machina. "Irreversible" is different in that writer-director- lenser Gaspar Noe shows two scenes of brutality which could presumably be believed given the degree of person-to-person rage that finds expression in today's world, and disproves one statement I used to hear when I was a kid: "You can walk anywhere in Europe at any time and feel completely safe."
Assuming an audience sophisticated enough to know more or less what "Irreversible" is like, the picture is for those who do not care about plot or dialogue but who go out of curiosity to see what the buzz is all about. If the plot is thin as papier mache (which it is) and the dialogue insipid as a bowl of Pablum (which it is), the selective audience will not care as long as Noe offers them unusual photography, particularly if it tends, as did director Daniel Myrick in "The Blair Witch Project," to make us nauseated as we watch in our seats and so long as Noe fiddle-faddles with the narrative structure as did Christopher Nolan with "Memento."
Noe opens his skeletal story with its conclusion, working backwards (as did Nolan in "Memento") on a couple of dreary men recounting some memories, one spouting the aphorism which becomes the unrealized tag line of the film, "Time Destroys Everything." We enter The Rectum, a gay club not unlike the Greenwich Village bathhouses of the sixties, as a cocaine-addled Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and his best friend Pierre (Albert Dupontel) barrel through the dark, cavernous sex house looking frantically for Le Tenia, a pimp who had raped Marcus's girlfriend Alex (Monica Bellucci) and beaten her into a coma. In an extended scene of one-on-one violence, Pierre bashes the wrong guy with a fire extinguisher a dozen times until his skill cracks open, all of which is viewed by the audience through the dark room illuminated only by a red light. Noe flashes back to a series of other extended episodes, his wildly spinning camera gradually coming to a dead halt as Alex, disgusted with her boyfriend's drugged behavior and going home alone from a party, stupidly uses an underpass and is raped for a full nine minutes by Le Tenia (Jo Prestia). Heading back toward the beginning fo the story we can see why Marcus goes nuts after seeing Alex bloody and comatose as he and Alex enjoy a prolonged scene of sex and pillow talk culminating in the beginning of the story, a bright, sunny day that finds children and dogs romping innocently in the park.
The dialogue is obviously improvised though Alex and Marcus have terrific chemistry (they'd better given the open sexuality on the screen), but watching Marcus, Pierre and Alex talking together about sex like a bunch of horny, showoff teens is off- putting. Most of all, Albert Dupontel's Pierre is annoying as a fifth wheel, the chap who had been Alex's boyfriend but who after being rejected by Alex in favor of Marcus continues to tag along like a puppy who does not know that he has been cast aside.
As for the film's leading sell-point, maybe I went to a tough prep school: I can understand walkouts by audience members fed up with the banality of the talk but I cannot comprehend how people could have fainted, retched, and felt absolutely disgusted by what they saw on the screen unless they are shills for the company doing what they've been told to do in order to bolster box office receipts for weeks to come. Rape is not pleasant and in performing the brutalities, Jo Prestia chatters on in much the way you'd expect a guy in a cheap porn flick to display his contempt for women. The lack of blood-and-guts, Peckinpah-style brutality comes across no better than the revenge scene that crosses the screen early on.
If you crave mayhem with a real story to match, rent "Baise-Moi" ("Rape Me"), Virginie Despontes and Coralie Trinh Thi's envelope- pusher full of incidents of loveless sex and casual violence, as porn characters Manu and Nadine, the former a victim in a graphic rape scene team up and take out their anger toward men while shooting women who might supply them with money. In one scene they enter the Libertine sex club, quite like The Rectum of Noe's movie, bash a man's head a few times on the bar, and shoot up the patrons, both men and women. The last person alive in the club is made to oink like a pig only to have a gun placed deep into his butt before the trigger is pulled.
Compared to that, "Irreversible" is Disney.
Not Rated. 99 minutes. Copyright 2003 by Harvey Karten at
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