|
 |
|
Irreversible
****
Cinema
Reviews - Week of February 14, 2003
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 18. France.
98 minutes. Written and directed by Gaspar Noe. Starring Monica Bellucci,
Vincent Cassel, Albert Dupontel, Philippe Nahon, Jo Prestia, Stephane Druout,
Jean-Louis Costes.
I staggered out of
"Irreversible" feeling shaken and destroyed. Whether I will
ever be able to sit through it again is at present a question without answer,
but no matter, because it will not be forgotten in a hurry. In its final
moments, the screen turns white, starts to flicker, and the flickering speeds
up until our eyes can see nothing but the visual patterns of a panic attack.
Watching the movie has the impact of bashing your head against a wall in
unanswerable frustration.
This is incredible. I mean, it's not like I wasn't
prepared. Waiting in line at a film festival last year, I found myself in
conversation with a group of guys who had just walked out of their screening.
"Irreversible", they panted. Disgusting, they shouted. A girl was getting
raped for ten minutes, and then the rapist unleashed vulgar insults and kicks
to the victim's face. No need, they told me, with aghast eyes, and voices
of angered disbelief. Sick.
And that report has stayed with me for five months.
This was going to be hard to take.
The film opens with end credits, moving the wrong
way down the screen. Then the text seems to tilt and drift offscreen. Images
appear, through a handheld camera that does not jerk but flows in all directions,
sliding past faces and up to the sky, and upside down and around. We're
disorientated already, and then we enter an underground club of confounding
tunnels, pitch blackness and neon red. A guy searches the place, rushing
around as best he can, violently grabbing the sordid patrons and asking,
"Where's the Tenia? Where's Tenia? Do you know Tenia?"
The visuals are frustrating and the sound bellows
with menace. After a long, intense search, a guy is beaten to death. Then
we cut to the scene beforehand, showing Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and Pierre
(Albert Dupontel) on their way to the club. "Irreversible" tells its story
backwards -- how these guys get violent revenge for the rape and beating
of their lady friend Alex (Monica Bellucci), how the attack itself went down,
and how the evening was progressing before that. The movie closes with scenes
of peace, and a revelation that makes the ugly, brutal violence all the more
depressing.
"Time destroys everything," reads the caption
at the end, and although these words could have appeared if the story had
been told in a conventional linear way, they would not be as shattering.
The structure is masterful because it captures the anguish of replaying something
in the memory, back to before things turned sour. Instead of an opening of
playful introduction that hurtles toward disaster, we are arrested at the
beginning, and the quietness of the ending is filled with a sense of loss.
The calmer scenes become, the more elegy and anger we can feel from the hearts
of the filmmakers.
Most of "Irreversible" takes place in long, unbroken
takes. The audacity of the actors, especially in the rape sequence, is
astonishing. As we spend time with them, as the camera takes its unsettling
meanders around them, we are absorbed and challenged. Few films are as
uncomfortably involving as this one -- the techniques lack subtlety, and
could have come off as amateurish, but they pound and build in the way that
bad recollections circle in the mind to create queasiness and stress. I give
the movie four stars because I feel compelled to do so. Whatever you make
of its quality, its effectiveness is hard to argue.
COPYRIGHT©
2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
2003 Reviews
(alphabetical)
2003 Reviews (by star
rating)
Archive of all cinema reviews
(alphabetical)
Review Archive
Index
UK
Critic main page
|
|
![[Image]](http://www.ukcritic.com/posbanr2.gif)