Irréversible is considered a video nasty of sorts. There is a definite split between critics upon whether the work is vicious exploitation or true art (few argue there’s a middle ground with this film). Regardless of which camp you decide to enter, one cannot refute that director Gaspar Noé can at least attract attention and, during this day and time, if you have something to say, it’s getting harder and harder to get people to give you even a few seconds of their time, no less ninety-nine minutes. Noé succeeds to garner people’s attention with Irréversible on the basis of notoriety alone. Unfortunately, the director, as with any artist, is unable to force thought in each person who walks away having watched his film and that’s were, in my opinion, the criticism lies.
The question stands: What does he do once he has your attention? Quite a lot actually and in a masterful manner which only an auteur like Noé can achieve. The film’s twelve scenes are shot in reverse chronological order. By so doing, what would seem climatic is long behind us and what would seen introductory and cursory, thereby comes paramount. During the last scene, a character is seen reading a tract on the theory of time and that, my friends, is the essence of this work. By reversing the narrative order, the events at the end of the film becomes a gut-wrenching finale where, if it were placed at the open, would have probably lost itself in all that followed as happens all too often in everyday life.
The plot is fairly simple. A couple, Alex (Monica Bellucci) and Marcus (Vincent Cassel), go out for an evening on the town and find themselves at a party. Alex decides to return home early and is brutally raped in a vacated subway channel by “Le Tenia” (Jo Prestia). Marcus and Alex’s former boyfriend, Pierre (Albert Dupontel), seek revenge and find themselves at “The Rectum,” a gay dive, where Pierre kills the wrong man by bludgeoning his skull with a fire extinguisher.
I have intentionally omitted the beginning as well as the end of the film because they are key to the film’s power. The primary criticism of the work is that the rape scene spans upwards to nine minutes without cuts or camera movement. Many cite this as excessive and exploitive to the point of perversity and indulgent immorality on the director’s behalf. I argue that by presenting the scene in such a manner, Noé makes his as uncomfortable as possible (which a change of camera angle, however slight, might afford us) for the real time duration in which the victim experiences the event. As a result, we become more empathic, not sympathetic, of her plight. Also, the non-glamorized manner in which the scene is portrayed will strike a nerve with many because it further takes away the Hollywood sheen from previous depictions of such an act. Noé attempts to give the viewer rape as it is, not how it might or “should” be in order for such a scene to be “tolerable” to a mass audience (which, hence, it shouldn’t be). As such, I find it highly unlikely that even the most hardened sexual sadist will find pleasure in the scene and therefore defeats the effort of those citing it as mere gratuitous violence.
For many directors, this should be enough for one film, yet Noé further offsets our equilibrium in order to convey the mental and emotional chaos of the characters throughout the film in his ingenious use of camera work, the incorporation of an unnerving soundtrack, and by an effective color scheme.
The camera quakes and shifts from the first frame and doesn’t stabilize until the closing scene (thus paralleling the unstable events in their order as they are presented). It is reminiscent to the manner in which The Blair Witch Project was shot in that, during my theater viewing of the latter, the perpetually quaking camera created such nausea that I had numerous people vomiting around me.
Noé adds to this by supplementing the visuals with a biologically-reactive soundtrack within the first thirty minutes of the film (where the chaos is at its peak). Thomas Bangalter, one half of the avant garde electronic duo Daft Punk, formulates a low rumble which is barely audible that creates a sense of vertigo in humans. Of the many people who left the film before its close, I would venture to guess many of those didn’t make it to the rape scene, thus cannot legitimately critique the sexual violence as the reason for having abandoned the film, but rather left the work due to an uneasiness and irritation as a result of the background “noise.” If nothing else, the director obviously wanted to create a Pavlovian response to such events in the A Clockwork Orange sense of the term and, for such people as above, might have succeeded too well in this regard.
Finally, the abrasive nature of the events onscreen, especially the rape and murder, are further compounded in their severity due to the color schemes (which are juxtaposed at the film’s climax): crimson reds and a conglomeration of bright oranges and yellows respectively, which–if you know anything about color theory–was anything but coincidental on the director’s part.
It is interesting for those who cite this movie as borderline pornography because, yes, shot chronologically, it could easily be viewed from this perspective. However, by the mere shifting the narrative structure, the work becomes a masterful telling of a tragic tale (not to imply that if you watch porn backwards it will have the same effect). But, the events which are seen on screen as secondary subtheses for the director, whose primary concern is to make his audience consider how the constraints of time force meaning upon our world (most everyone will blame one particular character early into the film only to quickly revoke their accusations later into the film). He succeeds masterfully in yes, a moral tale, which urges us to stop and reconsider before making rash assumptions and snap judgments about the world around us.
-Egregious Gurnow
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- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
