Movies: Irreversible

Like Memento (which Irreversible has been rather unfairly compared to; the two films couldn't be more dissimilar), Irreversible plays backwards. So total is this conceit that the end credits roll back up the screen first, and the first thing we see is a coda. Then a violent climax. Then scenes building to a violent climax; then unease; then sunny calm; then joy ... and then nothing.

The opening brutality takes place in a hellish homosexual club somewhere in Paris, "Rectum," where two men, Pierre (Albert Dupontel) and Marcus (Vincent Cassel) are searching frantically for someone named Le Tenia ("The Tapeworm"). In a horrible misunderstanding, they corner the wrong man; Marcus is sexually assaulted, and Pierre seizes the fire extinguisher and batters the man's head to a pulp. This man, we learn, is a rapist, the one who bludgeoned their friend Alex (Bellucci) in a roadway underpass a few hours earlier.

Further back: The two of them, in a cab, hurtling towards the club. We find out Marcus stole the cab, bludgeoning the driver and spraying him with his own Mace. Why did they steal it? Further back: They are aggressively questioning a series of prostitutes, including one who may have been at the scene and was able to give them a name. The cabbie barely speaks English and becomes an unwitting target for their frustration. Further back: We see the two of them being taken on this journey by two thuggish men who can promise them revenge, after being morosely questioned by the police. Further back: They emerge from the club and see Alex's comatose form being loaded into the ambulance. Further back still: the rape itself, in one mammoth unbroken shot.

There is more before that, but curiously, the film generates the greatest suspense out of the simplest things, which I will not reveal here. By playing everything backwards, the movie substitutes a more thoughtful and moving set of revelations for the original revenge-thriller plotting. The rape and the murder are provided for us first as background for everything else. Because we see a failed attempt at vengeance first, there's no suspense about that — something a lesser movie would be wallowing in. Suspense comes from other, more important things: the nature of her relationship to these two men, the behavior that allowed her to be attacked, and other key things which I am loathe to reveal here.

The film also does other things by showing Bellucci's character as a victim first and then as a character. The first time we see her doing anything, it's attempting to cross the street and being punished mercilessly for it. Later we see her at a party with her friends, enjoying herself, and dressed in an outfit that turns heads all the way across the room. A simpleminded interpretation would be that by dressing so provocatively and walking around at night, she deserved what she got. But no one "deserves" rape, and the film makes it clear that she was at best a hapless bystander that became an opportunistic victim only against her will.

Consider also Dupontel as Pierre and Cassel as Marcus. Cassel has appeared in many good movies — The Crimson Rivers and Brotherhood of the Wolf come to mind — but emerges here in a completely different light. He's usually typecast as either a villain or a sleaze, but here he comes across as a basically nice guy who happens to have a party-animal streak. Alex loves Marcus dearly (and vice versa), but he seems to rely too much on booze and drugs to get himself to have a good time. Pierre, Alex's former boyfriend, is older, more sedentary, and tries to play voice of reason to Marcus when he becomes inflamed with rage. The key word is "tries," since his final (?) actions become all the more disturbing the more we learn about him. Interestingly enough, Cassel and Bellucci were married at the time of the film; their behavior towards each other is real and palpable.

Irreversible must have presented serious technical challenges to the crew. Every scene is a single unbroken shot (although some are cleverly stitched together from multiple shots using swish-pans), with variable lighting and many other complicated real-world factors. (In what probably counts as some of the most original use of digital effects in any movie, the smashed face of the victim, Alex's bruises and the rapist's genitals were all added in post.) The opening murk of the film is difficult to see through, but appropriate to the Inferno the characters must navigate, and the actors inhabit their roles naturally. (No finished script was written; instead, a simple outline with talking points for each scene was devised and the actors improvised within the time constraints of there being film still in the camera.)

Gaspar Noe, the director, seems to make emotional devastation his mainstay. His last film, I Stand Alone, was equally brutal to its characters, and included a sort of choose-your-own-ending device that made it all the more gut-wrenching. (In an amusing connection between the two films, he opens with the protagonist of that earlier movie and fills us in on his fate as a segue to the main action.)

Here, he uses a different device and to totally different ends — to show us, if I read the movie correctly, that we are not the masters of our respective destinies, that we are slaves to time's flow, that if we knew our futures we would find life unlivable. On the other hand, the movie does not entirely abandon hope, and presents us with the possibility that even if the future is unavoidable, it is also not set. Maybe the only way to express notions like this is through a movie no less brutal than the ideas it expounds. Whether or not you agree is another story, but there is no denying Irreversible has real emotion and isn’t just a shock show.