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 Irreversible,
starring Vincent Cassel and Monica Bellucci (it’s a busy week for
the Italian bombshell, also starring in Tears
of the Sun), is such a ferociously unpleasant experience
that, as powerful as it is, I’m hesitant to recommend it without
first issuing a slew of disclaimers. It features two sequences—an
attack in which a man is literally beaten to a pulp and a brutal
rape scene—that are almost impossible to watch. Though many have
made the charge, I don’t think anyone can rightly accuse Gaspar
Noé, the film’s director, writer, editor, and cinematographer, of
using sex or violence as titillation. He shoots his sequences in
long, unbroken takes, and the unblinking horror that results is,
I think, the opposite of exploitation. There has been so much lurid
bloodletting in the movies that you might think nothing could faze
us anymore. Think again.
Noé isn’t really investigating the nature of violence; he’s just
placing it before us in a way that is more sadistically charged
than anything we’ve become accustomed to. The value in this, if
indeed there is value, is that Noé forces the audience to examine
its responses to what is real and what isn’t. Watching the film
makes you feel trapped and crazed—much the way you might feel if
all this were actually happening before your eyes. He reclaims the
power of cinema to astonish, but in the most hellish of terms.
The difference between Noé’s film and, say, Pulp Fiction
is that Tarantino plays around with mayhem with a movie maven’s
brio and shuffles time schemes because he likes puzzles. Noé, on
the contrary, is deadly serious about the mayhem he inflicts on
us, and his time-juggling is philosophically purposeful: The film's
story, in which the two lovers snuggle and screw and argue before
moving on to a rock-the-house party that Bellucci fatefully leaves
alone, unwinds in reverse—an especially horrific ploy because we
know what will happen. We begin in horror and end in tenderness.
. (1 hr. 30 mins.; R) —PETER RAINER
Opens March 7
• Showtimes
& tickets (movietickets.com)
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