(BY ALI NADERZAD) Consider this: the first thirty minutes of Gaspar Noe's Irreversible have a background noise added, which hovers around the 28 hz frequency. This type of frequency causes nausea, sickness and vertigo in humans; this might help explain the numerous walkouts on the festival circuit the year the film came out (2002; San Sebastian, Cannes)--though there were other reasons (fire extinguisher, anyone?). Irreversible, which stars Vincent Cassel and Monica Bellucci caused debate, dissension and managed at the same time to bring us deep into the moist recesses of France's libidinous culture. The film was aptly named: the story unspools itself in reverse, so that the first scene is the last one and the last one the first. Many of the people who walked out overlooked, perhaps, the fact that great satisfaction can be derived from this contrarian process. Noe, an Argentine whose father was a well-known painter, likely envisioned this mostly improvised project as an offshoot of the previous film of that ilk, the 1998 I Stand Alone (Seul Contre Tous; original title). In the opening shot of Irreversible viewers will recognize Philippe Nahon, the disgruntled brute from I Stand Alone; he is sitting in his room at a flea-bag motel, a vacant look on his face, muttering some afterthoughts in a gravelly voice to another man sitting nearby. The camera slowly spins away from the room and leaps off the building; it starts hovering above the exterior scene: Cassel and Dupontel being removed from the S&M club Rectum.
For some in the audience, Irreversible will have to be reduced to one scene and one scene only: a rape, that of Monica Bellucci's. People have commented about its excruciating length or its gasp-inducing violence. A rape means violence, a rape is a rape is a rape. The violence of the scene, however, is such that the audience takes lesser rank next to the camera itself. The camera is endowed with voyeuristic tendencies by the filmmaker. And that is 'la chose qui derange' (the disturbing thing) with Noe, at least that's what I'm guessing some of the walk-outs would say. Noe turns a film camera into a pulsating thing and endows it with a hard-on. The camera tried to make viewers accomplices, at least in a voyeuristic frame of mind, to the point of manipulating them, perhaps? Noe's true intentions behind Irreversible are not well-known to us. But, given the vastly unscripted nature of the film, the film's ultimate meaning is likely not known to the filmmaker himself either. What remains enjoyable about the film is its severe unpopularity among the film establishment; this is the ideal film for celluloid agitprop: small budget, exceptional actors, a seemingly unaudacious story line which quickly develops into a caricature of its former self, and a soundtrack that would make any tronic-heads spin; Guy-Homem de Christo, one half of French group Daft Punk, wrote songs on the soundtrack especially for the film.
Gaspar Noe's Irreversible (2002)
