Irreversible: Rape, Murder, and Dizzying Camerawork

At the 1998 New York Film Festival question and answer session following the screening of his I Stand Alone, Franco-Argentinian director Gaspar Noé mentioned that his goal was to make a film that would be banned in France and many other nations around the world, including the United States, just like his own personal favorite Salo, or 120 Days of Sodom (1975), by the great Pier Paolo Pasolini. Noé went on to say that he was disappointed that no such ban had occurred, despite the film's overt shock tactics like the near-constant racist and homophobic diatribe heard in voiceover and the gruesome violence targeted first at a pregnant mother, then more explicitly at a 10-year-old girl. While I presume he set out to accomplish the same goal with his latest Irreversible, it must be reported that not only has the film failed to procure its ban in France, but that Noé, quite surprisingly, has made a film that is more viscerally tragic than repugnantly exploitative.

To say that Irreversible takes the anus as its dominant visual motif would be an understatement. Images of the anus appear throughout the film, from subway tunnels to underpasses, but none more blatant and literal than the gay nightclub called the Rectum that serves as the film's representation of Hell. From the start Noé is preoccupied with assigning symbolic value to the orifice. Whereas Bernardo Bertollucci in Last Tango in Paris viewed the anus as a special zone of social protest, and David Cronenberg in Crash saw it as a liberating entryway to a new sexuality, Noé is more culturally conservative, subscribing to a traditional idea of the anus as a locus of inversion and violent "unnatural" activity.

In the opening moments of the film, Noé's camera hovers over the Rectum, as we see one man brought out on a stretcher with his arm broken and then seconds later another man in handcuffs. The vertiginously mobile camera follows each one of the men into the ambulance and police car, respectively, and then swoops off into the night. With the smoothest of transitions Noé brings us back to the same location, presumably some time earlier, as the same two men now with the names Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and Pierre (Albert Dupontel) prepare to descend into the Rectum to find a pimp called the Tapeworm (Joe Prestia), who raped Marcus's girlfriend Alex (Monica Bellucci) and beat her into a coma. Noé's camera overhead, accompanied by a sickening drone that floods the soundtrack, spirals like a drill and then in a move of bravura technique worthy of Brian De Palma, follows Marcus and Pierre through the club for the duration of the scene until the former has his arm broken and is nearly raped, and the latter, in a burst of potentially vomit-inducing violence, bashes in the head of a man mistaken for the Tapeworm with a fire extinguisher.

For those squeamish audience members who somehow make it through the head-bashing, Noé has another trick up his sleeve sure to get them to walk out: a 10-minute-long rape scene. This controversial centerpiece begins as a steadycam shot tracking Alex from behind as she enters a Parisian underpass alone wearing a revealing evening dress and then locks into a static composition once she is accosted by the Tapeworm, who proceeds to anally rape her. Unlike Sam Peckinpah in Straw Dogs, Noé does nothing to intimate that Alex is aroused by her rape. Bellucci, pinned to the ground with a hand over her mouth to prevent her from screaming, nevertheless, manages to express the full agony and despair of the situation, while the viewer is left with no place else to look but at her torture for what seems like an endless period of time. Still, with its precise symmetry, infernal red tint, and the actors' bodies posed like figures in a Francis Bacon painting, the scene might be a bit abstract to convey the truly unbearable quality of the event. If Noé wanted this rape scene to have the same impact as the earlier murder in the club, he might have considered beginning with the beating and then following it with the rape itself.

What most surprises about Irreversible is the tenderness that follows the brutal first half. This is in large part due to the three main actors. Monica Bellucci, who may be the most beautiful woman in film today, her real-life husband Vincent Cassel, the gangly tough guy who acts with fire, and the quietly neurotic Albert Dupontel as Alex's ex-boyfriend Pierre have terrific chemistry together, and their improvised conversation in a subway about orgasms is a lot of fun. As for Bellucci's and Cassel's scenes with each other, one need only look at the gorgeous scene of naked post-coital repose that concludes the film to see why they are France's hottest couple. But Noé himself should also be credited. From the beginning Noé uses long takes that force the viewer to participate in the action and empathize with the characters (despite the little we know about them) in their extreme situations. One imagines that aggressive cutting would have produced the opposite effect--exploitation.

Irreversible is bookended with the epigram "Time destroys everything." Noé must certainly be proud of this philosophical pronouncement to include it twice in the film, but it is impossible to take it as anything other than babble, especially after he proves quite the contrary through the dramatic action of the narrative. The universe of Irreversible is a Hobbesian one in which man (though not necessarily woman) is an animal, the greatest danger to others and himself, and thus he "destroys everything." But it is also a universe where Beethoven (the second movement of his Seventh Symphony swells at the film's conclusion) and Monica Bellucci are joined in cosmic union.