Irreversible

WARNING: This review contains many-a-spoiler

Irreversible (2002) is a nightmare about modern savagery, awkwardly wedging its weighty philosophizing between raw, exploitation violence and Woody Allen-esque sex comedy. The beginning, at least, has the look and feel of hell: flashing red lights, menacing low-frequency score, agonizingly long takes, tunnels and caverns with ever-lower depths, and characters that are fundamentally out of control and unaccountable.

The narrative is told in backwards chronology, starting in a hellish gay S&M club where two men, Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and Pierre (Albert Dupontel) are looking to seek revenge against a sadistic pimp, La Tenia, who brutally assaulted Marcus' girlfriend, Alex (Monica Bellucci) in a pedestrian underpass (more on that scene later). These early scenes depict Marcus as a violent, unhinged maniac, hurling homophobic, racist epithets, and threatening violence against everyone he encounters. As the film takes us back in time, we see a cuddlier, gentler Marcus, but signs of the inner-asshole (or savage) are ever-present. The casual way he calls people "fags," snorts coke, manhandles and harrasses Pierre, pees in someone's apartment sink, and nearly has anonymous sex with two prostitutes in a bathroom at a party that he just brought his beautiful, pregnant girlfriend to, portend, at least to this viewer, the ignorance and insanity that we've just seen ensue.



As thoroughly as director Gaspar Noe tries to wax philosophical about man's savagery, he struggles to shake off the nasty homophobic taste that his first scene in the gay S&M club leaves. Literally and figuratively, we have entered the bowels of hell, or club Rectum, as it's called, and the leather daddies are more like horned up zombies than human beings. In this scene, Noe makes no attempt to distinguish between consensual/non-consensual sex; rape vs. role play, as a horde of gay men masturbate frantically while an act of violence is perpetrated with a fire extinguisher that is so heinous, so drawn-out, and so realistic, that yes, it counts in my book, as (cue trumpet fanfare) the most disturbing movie scene of all time. And no I am not talking about the 8-minute rape scene...that happens later, or earlier, if you catch my drift.

In his review of the film, Salon's Andrew Hehir's makes the argument that writing about Irreversible without bringing up anal sex is "a little like writing about William S. Burroughs without mentioning heroin and homosexuality, or writing about "Six Feet Under" without mentioning death..." There's no doubt that the film uses anal sex as a symbol, and the meaning of that symbol includes, but is perhaps not limited to, perversity, depravity, disease, violence.

You could argue that Marcus' racist treatment of a Chinese cab driver mitigates the homophobia argument-- that Noe is simply pointing out Marcus' savagery. But the evidence for homophobia in the film is not so much in Marcus' characterization but in how Noe extracts the extreme negative stereotypes of gay sex to establish a palpable mood of hell.

Noe's depiction of women isn't much better. Though he throws in a line about how "women aren't objects" they might as well be given how slight and silly his characterization of Alex is. What the film says about Pierre, the "intellectual" one, Peckinpah already said in Straw Dogs thirty years before this was made. Has nothing happened socially in the past thirty years that warrants an evolving -- or more nuanced -- interpretation of human nature? The film's themes could essentially be boiled down to the following equations: Woman = mother, victim. Man = intellect AND brute. Gays = very bad.

On an atmospheric, superficial level, the film mostly succeeds, due in part to genius casting. Vincent Cassel, who looks more like Nosferatu than a primate (which he is called ad nauseam by Pierre in one of the film's many tipping off of its themes) is both handsome and animalistic, with bat-like ears and a broad forehead. Bellucci is similarly both a posh Paris glamour girl early in the film before being revealed as a naked curvy earth mother. That the two are real-life partners certainly aids in their emotional and animal chemistry during a frank, naked cuddling scene.

But for a film that tries to make a statement about Human Nature (with capital letters) in the grand scheme, Noe's film falls short in the smaller details. A tonally disastrous scene involving the neurotic Pierre's search for sexual truth reveals Noe's limits with dialogue, comedy, and characterization just as his unkind attitudes towards women and gays reveal his limited reading of social history. Noe strives for profundity (and has a poster of 2001: A Space Odyssey visible for a good chunk of the movie to prove it) but Irreversible is more compelling (and even morally palatable) on its surface -- as a combustible, amoral, free-wheeling punk-rock descent into S&M hell -- than it is when you go (no pun intended) deeper.

Postlude;
Now as for the scene where La Tenia anally rapes the Bellucci character: the scene, in my mind, actually is pornographic for its cartoonish nature and excessively stylized set design/lighting/camera angle. La Tenia is a well-acted but very typical movie monster: an attractive, totally psychotic villain with comic energy. He might as well be the new Batman villain (He even has a cool name- The Tapeworm!) .I don't view this scene as having a function other than to alternately revolt/arouse. In fact, the scene only crystallizes the argument that Noe is obsessed with everything anal, as if it were the forbidden apple in the Garden of Eden that leads man to damnation.

Further reading: Ed Gonzalez's review in Slant Magazine which influenced me greatly.