IRREVERSIBLE (2002)

directed by Gaspar Noe

This film is infamous for a rape scene in the middle of the movie. A gorgeous Alex (played in a skin-tight dress by Monica Bellucci) makes a bad decision by going taking a low-traffic underground tunnel to get to the subway (she was going to take a taxi, but a prostitute said, “Take the understreet passage. It's safer.”) It never occurs to Alex that a prostitute might view her with envy and contempt and might lead her down an unsafe path. Nor does it occur to Alex to use her common sense (taxi or underground passage... taxi or underground passage). It seems almost as if fate were pulling her into a certain direction. And once there, she discovers nothing but immense pain, followed by silence (she slips into a coma). Time destroys everything.

This point, “time destroys everything” is the theme of a movie that's well-made and yet reeks of desperation, immense pretension, and is also layered, just soaking in dreadful irony. This is a theme that is taken quite literally in places: the rape itself is done in one long eight-minute take. Our brazenly misogynistic rapist takes his sweet-ass time about, pausing occasionally to get high. In that entire time, only one person shows up in the tunnel (One person in eight fucking minutes? Seriously?) and they see what is happening and turn around and go back. Alex does everything she can to thwart her attacker... wait, no she doesn't. When the attacker appears, fighting and threatening Guillermo, a transvestite prostitute, Alex stands, shell-shocked, when she should be running for her life (which is exactly what Guillermo does when she realizes she can get away). The rapist flashes a blade at her, and that's pretty much that. Eight minutes later, not only does she have an ass full of blood and spunk, she's also had the everyloving shit kicked out her. And we were forced to sit and watch the whole damn thing start to finish. Shock-art. Yay.

To be honest, we've already been desensitized to the rape before we ever get there (the first of a few ironies in this film). The film has us backtracking from the events that happen just after the rape to the events that preceded. Had the film been edited consequentially, we would have been alighted upon Alex reading a book about fate and time in a meadow, we would have shared in good news with her, we would have watched with lustful delight as she plays around with her lover Vincent Cassel, would've laughed at the silly sophomoric musings of Pierre as they travel to a party on the subway, watched melodrama unfold in an almost reality-tv sense of banality as M has the good time normally reserved for swinging bachelors while Pierre tries to control him and Alex simply dances. The fight between Alex and M is quick and Alex's decision to leave by herself seems forced and unmotivated, and then suddenly the rape scene comes out of nowhere and we're shocked! Shocked!

But no, the film begins with two random dudes sitting on a bed talking about how one of them had sex with their nine-year-old daughter. Really. The other nods, declares that time destroys everything. The grotesque is racked with guilt but says the experience itself was pure bliss, while the pathetic reassures him that his guilt is unfounded: “there is no right, there is no wrong. There is what you do, and what you don't do.” (this is maybe the fourth or fifth ironic thing about this movie). Their inspirational conversation is interrupted by the sound of sirens. Below them, M and Pierre have ransacked a gay sex club known as the Rectum (is it ironic that they rape the Rectum in search of the rapist who raped Alex's rectum or is that just directorial paralellism?), gotten in a fight with a random stranger while searching for said rapist, and in the process pounded this guy's face into mush with a fire extinguisher (and yes, we are there for every minute of that as well).

Some people will claim this “from the ass to the mouth” cinematic path (oh goodness, another symbolic use of the true theme of the film, “anal rape”) is genuis. After giving it some thought (the thirty minutes required to write this review, though it is still thought), I think it's a bit chickenshit on Noe's part. How much more shocking would the rape scene have been if it had come out of nowhere? How would we have reacted to the vengeance that comes afterwards? What sort of emotional response would Noe have achieved? What would have been said had the final scene of the film been the final scene of the story? End with M on a stretcher, Pierre being arrested for murder, and two grotesques talking about the sheer bliss of incestuous pedophilia? Suddenly it goes from anal rape to a story about the making of a turd. Care to digest that, anyone?

6.46/10