Irreversible
(2002) dir. Gaspar Noé
viewed: 08/30/03
Brutal and harsh, dizzying and disorienting, Gaspar Noé’s film Irreversible is far from pleasurable. Notable for a vicious 10 minute plus rape scene centerpiece, this film would make even the non-squeamish squirm in discomfort.
The narrative of the film rolls out in reverse, a gimmick that could have some significance for the film’s commentary (some issues of fate are clumsily expressed late in the film), but doesn’t feel entirely necessary. The world of this film is bleak and harrowing, one in which worst-case scenarios have already played out. The film opens with the arrest of two characters that the audience does not know and then shows them entering a gay S & M club and brutally attacking and killing a patron. As the backward events unfold, it turns out that they are exacting revenge for the brutal, aforementioned rape.
The second half of the film, which I guess begins after (or before) the rape, seems almost anti-climactic. Perhaps that is the intention. As the audience is given the backstory to the characters that it has watched in traumatic action, there is a seeming lack of profundity to their lives. All of the horrors that befalls them, while potentially “fated”, are clearly otherwise seemingly random. Ultimately, there is something potentially existential being suggested, but I don’t know if the suggestion is made successfully. The brutality of the violence is the film’s signature more than anything, something without a solid context, but utterly palpable and affecting. My reaction to it is hard to quantify.
I did find the film either vaguely or explicitly homophobic. Not only is the gay S & M club shot as a dark and frightening place, but the patrons are sexually aroused and cheering for a harsh, pummeling murder like something clearly from a nightmare. Because they used a genuine gay S & M nightclub as the location for this sequence, there might be some sense that the filmmakers feel that their depiction has some basis in “reality,” but the image of the crowd in a sex-crazed bloodlust was nasty.
