Cast: Vincent Cassel, Monica Bellucci, Albert Dupontel

Director: Gaspar Noé

Screenplay: Gaspar Noé

Running time: 1 hr 39 mins

Genre: Drama



CRITIQUE:


Seeing, or more appropriately enduring, halfway through Irréversible, you’d think Gaspar Noé is barking mad. This Argentinian-born French filmmaker has clearly, perceptibly pushed the hot button of audience discomfort and catapulted the limits of cinematic extremities that this became the most booed movie in Cannes and the most walked-out film of 2003, or possibly the entire celluloid history. Such response would’ve detonated any filmmaker’s career – but then Noé isn’t any other filmmaker. Kubrickian in a sense that he braves criticism and backlash, and carries out cinematic indulgences that may be absolute pants and brain-fucking to many, but perhaps genius to some.


Whilst obviously flawed, Irréversible remains a mystery. And it's deliberately better off that way. It is extremely violent, where the aforementioned half-hour launches into a bleak Memento-like time-play, employed with surreal, outlandish and disorienting camerawork, swooping and soaring around the urban nightscape causing temporary vertigo. Then it plunges us deeply into the seedy underworld of sadomasochism, inside the labyrinthine lair of a gay nightclub called “Rectum”, with its red, hellish pulsating lights. The effect is claustrophobic, the setting nauseating. Vincent Cassel’s Marcus is on a hunt for the “Tapeworm”, and soon enough somebody’s face gets brutally smashed with a fire extinguisher in front of our eyes. It’s a cruel, unbearably excruciating scene to watch. No wonder people have stood up and gave the film a pass. But when things seem to have breathed air, the camera lands on an underpass ground for an unflinching 20-minute unbroken rape scene, with Monica Bellucci’s Alex fighting from a sexual assault – the result is technically jarring, as juxtaposed to a previous camera ploy, and the scene that unfolds is both a visual and psychological onslaught.


Those who had walked out at the middle of this would’ve never discovered the deep, befuddling ethos of Irréversible. Noé has played around with the gears of clockwork here, reversing an incident that has irreparable consequences to the lives of these characters. He initiates this film with a visual excess, with almost pornographic torture and bordering the exploitative territory, a form of violence on the unremittingly grim side of humanity – then he sheds out these grungy layers and peels the implications, impulses and reasons to the very core of this film by going back to the beginning. Like the many masters in literature and film art who had dabbled with time, figures like Vonnegut, Nolan and F. Scott Fitzgerald transposed by Fincher in the screen, these people understood that time is irrevocable. Noé means to undo a truly horrific crime in this revenge-tragedy tale, and ends in a self-conscious utopia with nods to Beethoven’s Allegretto and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. We see Bellucci lying on the grass, pregnant with a child that could change the paths of their lives, experiencing a blissful daydream. Whereas in real life – this backward-state cannot happen. That’s why cinema is here for us to elucidate many of life’s mysteries.


VERDICT:

Gaspar Noé has created something here that is arcane, nightmarish and self-consciously unsettling work of art. Many will find this nasty. Some will see it as profound. And a very few will think Irréversible is a work of an audacious artist who had the guts to make a bleak yet powerful statement about the futility of life, that “Time destroys everything.” It is a hyper-violent film that unpredictably advocates against violence. Nothing will prepare you for this. This is strictly not a film to like. It is a soul-battering, brutalising experience one will never forget.



RATING: A