Deplorable garbage or amazing genius? the irreversible film

Tipper Gore, bring out the big guns. ‘Irreversible’ is here, and he just threw a great first punch. No amount of boycotts, pickets, bans, or insults could stop this searing piece of moral certainty from landing, smoking, on the doors of video stores across the country. I have seen it myself. I walked to the store and picked it up, straight off the shelf. That was three nights ago, and ever since, my mind keeps going back to it, spinning and blocking out this aspect or that, unable to stop relating to something I wish I had never seen in the first place.

Yeah, I thought I’d seen it all. I’m one of those people who quotes lines from ‘Reservoir Dogs’ at parties and recreates the infamous ‘crotch crucifix’ scene from ‘The Exorcist’, laughing all the while. I don’t believe in censorship. To put it very basically, I believe that there is an inherent right for all of us, as humans, to create any art we please, without restriction, as long as no one is physically harmed, against their own will, in the process. It’s that belief that has made a movie like ‘Irreversible’ possible, and I find myself trying really hard not to drown on my own foot afterwards.

French-Argentine director Gasper Noe, who created a mild stir with his 1997 film, ‘Seul Contre Tous’ (‘I’m Alone’), and has elicited similar responses with his other two smaller films, ‘Sodomites’ (1998) and ‘Meat’ (1991) has managed to create something that is either an astonishing work of monumental genius or one of the most deplorable pieces of crap ever to be printed on celluloid, depending on who is looking of course.

Trust me when I tell you that it is the next step in desensitization. The film made massive waves with its world premiere at Cannes in 2002, causing people to walk out just twenty minutes after the film, with many more following less than half. It experienced similar reactions with its North American premiere at the Telluride and Toronto Film Festivals, and just three nights ago, it was all I could do to hold on as I sat on the couch, feeling every excruciating second tick by as I watched the infamous nine-minute rape scene appears in front of me for the first time.

Yeah kids, Irreversible has arrived, complete with deleted scenes, teasers, trailers, and everything else that comes with the typical DVD package these days. The movie itself, however, is far from typical. Picked up by Lions Gate Films, the company that has grown from a small art-house producer to a Hollywood major in the last seven years because it took risks like this (‘American Psycho’, ‘Dogma’ and ‘House of 1000 Corpses’ are just three of a long list of films that reeked of too much controversy for any of the ‘non-independents’ to touch) – the film’s official video release date in North America was the 5th August, but it got to my neck of the woods a bit late.

To be completely honest, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I hadn’t heard of it, but my night watching partner said he had been fully warned about the graphic nature of it. Whatever. I had seen ‘Faces of Death’, for God’s sake. Nothing could phase me.

Think again.

During the first few moments of the only crime scene in the film, which takes place around twenty minutes, I felt my lungs 16 and tears on the surface of my eyes. I immediately paused it and demanded to know if what we were watching was snuff, because if it was, I wasn’t watching anymore. My friend assured me that he wasn’t, and after a few minutes of regrouping we continued, holding on to the knowledge that this was truly a fantasy as my only protection. What developed was a work of art that managed to shake my moral and ethical codes to the core, its equivalent does not exist on film and is only found in Bret Easton Ellis’s hyper-controversial novel ‘American Psycho’.

The unrated film travels back in time, in the style of Harold Pinter’s ‘Betrayal’ and Christopher Nolan’s ‘Memento’, beginning with the final sequence in which the camera hurtles uncontrollably between the buildings of France, denying the viewer any real opportunity to get a foothold on what is above or below and managing to create the actual physical sensation of vertigo. Along with this, Noe also employed the use of extremely low frequency sound during this opening sequence for added effect. The entire film is shot in such a way as to appear unedited, creating a terrifyingly realistic and personal effect akin to stream-of-consciousness writing—another uncanny similarity to Ellis’s novel.

From there, he soon leads us to The Rectum, a gay S&M club, where he finds Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and his reluctant friend Pierre (Albert Dupontel) on an ongoing heated and conflictual search for the pimp known as The Tapeworm. . . The soundtrack vibrates relentlessly as the camera continues to swoop, exposing us to a number of ongoing homosexual acts, revealed only in the blood-red light of the club’s interior. As the scene unfolds, you can literally feel the violence coming. Once it happens, if you can really sit through it, you may wonder if you’ll be okay.

The film picks up from there to reveal the brutal rape and beating of Marcus’ girlfriend Alex (Monica Bellucci) by The Tapeworm in an underground tunnel, also blood red. This is the crowning moment of the film, fueling much of the controversy surrounding it. If you can get past this scene, the rest of the movie is a piece of cake. For the first time since I saw ‘The Shining’ at the age of seven, I had to look away. I had to close my eyes and try not to listen. Noe’s camera no longer fades into its earlier stupor: it has locked on to the scene in front of it, seemingly bolted to the ground as it unblinkingly records what is without a doubt one of the most haunting things I’ve ever witnessed on screen. .

And what is the point of all this? That’s a question you can’t help but have. This is a movie that doesn’t let you walk away without an opinion, and maybe that’s the point. You get the feeling, as the film continues its flow back from the nauseating aftermath of the beginning to earlier scenes of a friendlier and ultimately cuddly nature, that Noe had a very succinct knowledge of what he was doing when he built it this way. . To move it forward in chronological order as a simple rape revenge drama would be exploitative, no doubt about it. By having the murder take place in the first half hour of the movie, with the motive still unknown, he makes the violence even more horrific. Only later are we shown the reason for this, having witnessed the vicious fate befalling the alleged perpetrators, so there is no thirst for revenge, just a lingering question about the nature of morality and justice.

So does that make all of this okay? Does that validate a nine minute long rape scene that could be seen, and very likely will be seen, by children too young to understand the nature of art and censorship?

Before buying the novel ‘American Psycho’, I read a few passages at the bookstore. I found it on a low shelf in Chapters, along with a number of other copies right next to it, waiting to be picked up and read by anyone who might pass by. Once I finished it—easily one of the most exploitative, graphic, misogynistic, and gratuitous works of popular literature ever written—the most haunting thought I was left with was the ease with which I was able to pull it off. In Australia, the book comes wrapped in cellophane and you have to buy it at the counter, showing identification before it’s yours. Justified? I’d like to say yes, but once again, I don’t believe in censorship, in any form. If you’ve read ‘1984’, you’ll understand my bias.

So here I am, shaken again for the first time in years by a work of art that has already found its place in the world and, now that I’ve seen it, in my own head. Last night I sat down to watch ‘Resevoir Dogs’ again with a couple of friends who – to my astonishment – had never seen it before. During the first bloody scene, one of my friends lost some color in his face and had to move further away from the TV. Meanwhile, I sat there, feeling a strange numb sensation, as if a new layer of repaired tissue had built up around all my emotional sensors, and I wondered how numb these beliefs of mine could make me.

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