Irreversible - Lilith Likes to Watch

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Title: Irreversible
Year: 2002

Starring: Vincent Cassel, Albert Dupontel, Monica Bellucci

Director: Gaspar Noé

Synopsis: A woman’s lover and her ex-boyfriend take justice into their own hands after she becomes the victim of a rapist. Because some acts can’t be undone. Because man is an animal. Because the desire for vengeance is a natural impulse. Because most crimes remain unpunished. - via Letterboxd.com

Lilith's Notes: I was having a nice week until this happened.

Watch Now: Amazon

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"There are no bad deeds, only deeds."

This week, I was afforded a little staycation, which I welcomed with open arms. I was reckless, staying up until 4am playing video games and watching Youtube, subsisting on sugary snacks and prepackaged food. In this moment of hedonistic, damn-the-consequences existence, Kage and I decided to destroy our souls a little. For a treat.

We watched Irreversible.

You know what this movie is. We all know what it is. It’s Gaspar Noé at his Gaspar Noé-y-ist. It’s a rape revenge movie by way of Memento. It’s ugly and frenetic and loud and shameless. It’s gritty and raw and everything that polite society tries to hide or ignore.

Just in case you’ve just recently been allowed to legally enter bars and order your first beer, I’ll break down the concept of this film for you. Irreversible is a rape revenge film where the narrative is told backward, meaning the opening scene in the film is, chronologically, the final scene of the narrative. So the story starts with the climactic chaos, and ends in quiet contemplation.

Got it?

The opening is suitably disorienting, with the camera’s eye floating haphazardly through the streets and alleys. Streetlamps buzz, while blue ambulance lights pulse and flicker against damp brick walls. The way the footage is stitched together gives the illusion that the film is one long unbroken shot. It isn’t of course, but the craft certainly allows one to think it is. The illusion here works and absolutely no one can say that the movie isn’t innovatively presented, and that this isn’t a work of art. The presentation is on point. Nauseating with its pulsing lights and whipping camera that flagrantly throws away filming rules, but art can, and often is, nauseating.

We meet the men we will be backpedaling through the evening with. Marcus (played by Vincent Cassle) and Pierre (played by Albert Dupontel) fight their way through a gay sex club looking for a man called Le Tenia (played by Jo Prestia), and from there we find out the whose and why of their orgy of violence.

Marcus and Pierre both love a woman named Alex (played by Monica Bellucci), and it turns out that Le Tenia, despite being a homosexual pimp, raped her and put her in a coma due to the brutal beating she endured. Reason enough for revenge, right? The problem is that it’s a rape-revenge from the man’s point of view. From the director and story creator, all the way to the dialogue-improvising actors, it’s a guy’s movie.

Alex is broken and shunted off-camera, so no one has to deal with the actual fall out of her brutal attack and recovery, and all the parts of herself that she might have lost. For the first time in this film, the camera is unmoving throughout her attack, positioned so that everything is basically head on, and just askew of centre frame. We don’t see penetration, but Alex’s screams and the dialogue about how tight and bloody she is serves more than enough to convey the horror.

And when it’s over, she’s served her gratuitous purpose.

One could perhaps argue that we do learn about Alex in the time prior to the attack slash the second half of the film, where we watch her become slowly disillusioned with how immature Marcus is when he’s a sloppy drunk. Even then, it’s all about him. On the way to the party they attend, Pierre and Marcus discuss if they make Alex climax. She’s an object, through and through.

Alex and Marcus began the day so happily, but gradually, she realizes she left her ex, Pierre, for an oversexed, jobless bum who parties like he's still fifteen years old and doesn’t consider her in anything he does. With that realization, Alex leaves a party by herself, gets brutally raped, then loses both Pierre and Macrus as they go all The Bride on a bunch of folks.

All that while the director of photography pretends he's a technogoth and the sound engineer takes whatever the DP was taking, and tries to find beauty in absolute noise

The obvious message of this film is that vengeance makes men into animals, but it’s such a simple and reductive thesis. Visually the movie is commendable, this story of brutal revenge artfully presented, but the story it wraps itself around is so perfunctory and basic.

There is some deeper stuff here, but as a casual watch it’s a very unpleasant time, and as a rape-revenge film it’s just bad and unsatisfying.

Between this and Climax, I feel relatively secure in saying Gaspar Noé hates intimacy, kink, and he hates us all.

It’s not a rape-revenge film, it’s a coked-out bloodfest about how all good things inevitably come to an end.

Highlight: The narrative structure of the movie. It was intriguing and kept up interest with 'wait how did they get here?'

Lowlight: The entire first part of the movie where the camera was in the hands of a techno dancer high on E, while the audio guy wanted to see how annoying he could be without getting fired. It overshadowed everything about the first 10...15...? 20? Minutes of the movie.

LILITH'S SCORE: 2/5 - Nearly a 2.5, but I just couldn't get over the MAN PAIN of it all to rate it any higher.

Until next time, my voracious voyeurs. I’m Lilith, and I’m always watching.