Film Review: Irreversible (French)
Solicitous warning: this movie is not for the faint of heart. It has two of the most gruesome scenes that I’ve ever seen on celluloid. I barely made it through the movie by occasionally shutting my eyes tight.
I must confess at the outset that I am a sucker for foreign language films that have something to do with festivals such as Cannes or Sundance (well, it has worked for me so far :)). So when I saw these so-called symbols of good film-making on the posters for ‘Irreversible’, not to mention Monica Belluci in the cast, I assumed any (ahem..) healthy adult’s disposition towards the movie. Little was I to know that the movie would catch me with my pants down, in a manner of speaking, with its unflinching depiction of revenge and rape (in that order). But disturbing as it may be, I really liked the movie. More about why, towards the end.
This is one of those reverse-chronology movies (not many around. The first to use this technique was ‘betrayal’, then ‘memento’. This is the third as far as I know). But the technique fits so well with what the movie wants to say that the story told in the normal fashion would’ve missed the point.
Anyway, as the beginning titles roll out, you see everything in reverse order (the way you’d see words if you were reading something from the mirror). Silly gimmick, you think to yourself. Then the camera pans the depressing face of a building and zeroes in on a window, into a room with two old men, one naked, talking. By now you gather from the shaky and grainy shots, that the camera is a handheld. From the room, the camera moves on to a BDSM club aptly named ‘the rectum’. By now, the camera has acquired a life of its own, convulsing away, and you begin to wonder if the director’s hobbies include lomography. The time’s ripe for the first gruesome scene – the revenge. The camera is after 2 guys who are frenziedly looking for a guy called ‘Le Tenia’. They finally suspect one guy to be him, and one of the two grabs a fire extinguisher and repeatedly pounds the poor sod’s face with it. He goes on and on with his pounding and the camera can’t take its eyes off the face getting beaten to pulp (and you think to yourself, why can’t the fucking camera have its fits now).
Then slowly, the story retraces its steps. So the next scene has the two looking for ‘the rectum’, followed by the two asking for ‘Le Tenia’ and being directed to ‘the rectum’, and so on, until the story comes back to Alex (monica belluci) walking through a deserted subway and accosted by a guy (Le Tenia) and raped. Now this is to put it very simply. The rape scene is about 8-9 minutes long, where the camera freezes on the scene again to unflinchingly watch a woman being mercilessly raped and abused and defaced. Closing your eyes won’t suffice. You’ll also have to shut your ears tight too.
Only after this scene do you come to know that the two guys looking for Le Tenia are Marcus (Alex’s fiancé) and his friend (and Alex’s ex-lover). The movie ends with a very warm and leisurely scene with both Alex and Marcus completely and comfortably nude.
Enough about the movie. Let me ponder a while on why I like it. This is one of those movies that you reflect on. The buck doesn’t stop with ‘The End’. You think about the reverse chronology, you understand why the revenge had to be so brutal, and you try to see if the movie would have the same effect if shot in the normal way. And then you begin to see the beauty of the movie title, Irreversible. You see layers upon layers of metaphor, not to mention irony. You see the irreversibility of the rape and the mad frenzy and thirst for revenge that it sets off. And by reversing that irreversible sequence of events, the director has ended up making a movie that dwells on how threadbare the fabric of happiness is, and how blissful ignorance is (You, as the viewer, however, are cursed with the knowledge of the rape, and value the tender final scene that much more). Shot the normal way, it would merely have been another run-of-the-mill rape-revenge movie, completely robbed of its subtle social commentary.
I must confess at the outset that I am a sucker for foreign language films that have something to do with festivals such as Cannes or Sundance (well, it has worked for me so far :)). So when I saw these so-called symbols of good film-making on the posters for ‘Irreversible’, not to mention Monica Belluci in the cast, I assumed any (ahem..) healthy adult’s disposition towards the movie. Little was I to know that the movie would catch me with my pants down, in a manner of speaking, with its unflinching depiction of revenge and rape (in that order). But disturbing as it may be, I really liked the movie. More about why, towards the end.
This is one of those reverse-chronology movies (not many around. The first to use this technique was ‘betrayal’, then ‘memento’. This is the third as far as I know). But the technique fits so well with what the movie wants to say that the story told in the normal fashion would’ve missed the point.
Anyway, as the beginning titles roll out, you see everything in reverse order (the way you’d see words if you were reading something from the mirror). Silly gimmick, you think to yourself. Then the camera pans the depressing face of a building and zeroes in on a window, into a room with two old men, one naked, talking. By now you gather from the shaky and grainy shots, that the camera is a handheld. From the room, the camera moves on to a BDSM club aptly named ‘the rectum’. By now, the camera has acquired a life of its own, convulsing away, and you begin to wonder if the director’s hobbies include lomography. The time’s ripe for the first gruesome scene – the revenge. The camera is after 2 guys who are frenziedly looking for a guy called ‘Le Tenia’. They finally suspect one guy to be him, and one of the two grabs a fire extinguisher and repeatedly pounds the poor sod’s face with it. He goes on and on with his pounding and the camera can’t take its eyes off the face getting beaten to pulp (and you think to yourself, why can’t the fucking camera have its fits now).
Then slowly, the story retraces its steps. So the next scene has the two looking for ‘the rectum’, followed by the two asking for ‘Le Tenia’ and being directed to ‘the rectum’, and so on, until the story comes back to Alex (monica belluci) walking through a deserted subway and accosted by a guy (Le Tenia) and raped. Now this is to put it very simply. The rape scene is about 8-9 minutes long, where the camera freezes on the scene again to unflinchingly watch a woman being mercilessly raped and abused and defaced. Closing your eyes won’t suffice. You’ll also have to shut your ears tight too.
Only after this scene do you come to know that the two guys looking for Le Tenia are Marcus (Alex’s fiancé) and his friend (and Alex’s ex-lover). The movie ends with a very warm and leisurely scene with both Alex and Marcus completely and comfortably nude.
Enough about the movie. Let me ponder a while on why I like it. This is one of those movies that you reflect on. The buck doesn’t stop with ‘The End’. You think about the reverse chronology, you understand why the revenge had to be so brutal, and you try to see if the movie would have the same effect if shot in the normal way. And then you begin to see the beauty of the movie title, Irreversible. You see layers upon layers of metaphor, not to mention irony. You see the irreversibility of the rape and the mad frenzy and thirst for revenge that it sets off. And by reversing that irreversible sequence of events, the director has ended up making a movie that dwells on how threadbare the fabric of happiness is, and how blissful ignorance is (You, as the viewer, however, are cursed with the knowledge of the rape, and value the tender final scene that much more). Shot the normal way, it would merely have been another run-of-the-mill rape-revenge movie, completely robbed of its subtle social commentary.
posted by CogitoErgoConfusum at 10/08/2004 02:59:00 AM
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