Film Review: Irréversible (2002)
Graphic Thriller Designed Like the Roller Coaster from Hell
Few will argue that Irréversible is anything but unforgettable. The question is: is it a film worth the effort required to endure it? Taken objectively, there's much to praise about this controversial and unforgiving work, something of a technical masterpiece comprised of enough camera tricks and creative editing devices to make even Hitchcock's head spin. Scenes play out in long, unbroken takes that emphasize the festering, rotten "realism" of the film's chosen subject matter, utilizing extensive yet subtle, seamless CGI to achieve impossible shot after impossible shot with seemingly no obstacle or boundary too great to overcome. In this regard, the accomplishments of Irréversible are incontrovertible. It's also a film as likely to make you retch as any ever made.
Sound Designed to Make Audience Nauseous
No joke: the director, Gaspar Noé, has commented specifically on the use of his film's sound design to instill feelings of nausea in the audience, and that's just the tip of the matter. The electronic score – composed largely of discordant notes ascending/descending ad nauseam – suggests an out of control tilt-a-whirl, whereas the camera work swoops, spins, and swirls to no end as if it were caught up in some unseen tidal current, evoking the point-of-view of an inebriated housefly on steroids. Truly, the director achieves his goal of making the viewer feel quite out of their mind (many will feel at ill before the first scene has concluded), and for better or worse, Irréversible makes you hang on for dear life.
Commencing with a backwards-rolling end credits reel that appears to literally break – the celluloid strip sinks to the side of the screen like a wounded ship – Irréversible literally pummels the viewer out of their physical comfort zones; bad hangovers are cake by comparison. The story – concerning the violent, coma-inducing rape and beating of a woman and the subsequent efforts of her boyfriend and friend to locate and punish the attacker – unfolds in reverse, one chapter-like sequence at a time, with each segment filmed (or at least presented) as a single quease-inducing take. Memento utilized a similar style of backwards storytelling to simulate the memory deprivation of its main character. Irréversible's stylistic aims are, to say the least, more high fallutin'.
Empty Ambition
An opening scene with two nameless characters – one of them an unrepentant, incestuous rapist who drolly pontificates that "time destroys all things" – sets the tone and thesis for the rest of the film, which quickly devolves into brutal psycho-sexual mania. The end is the beginning: arriving at the wanted rapist's lair, a gay club named Rectum, Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and Pierre (Albert Dupontel) descend into the cave-like labyrinth with vengeance in mind, the end result being the complete destruction of a man's face via repeated blows from a fire extinguisher. Backing up further is the aforementioned sex crime: an agonizing, deliberately voyeuristic, bordering on ten minutes long sequence instantly legendary in its resultant walkouts (both male and female).
Noé rubs your face in the despair of it all, but the intended significance behind the film's violence is dubious at best. As events regress into considerably more routine, lighthearted affair, the encoded meaning reveals itself entire, even though the monotony of tone renders such calculations moot long before their purported revelations come to pass. Suggesting via its reversed chronology – a device that "sets in stone" the events following whatever we're currently watching – that choice is nonexistent/meaningless and we're all but the subjects of chaos flowing violently and inevitably throughout the universe, the film reaches for cosmic truth but instead grasps at low-rent philosophy, laughably shouting out to Kubrick's 2001 before concluding with the Big Bang that started it all. Noé's argument for nihilism is respectable in theory, but the film's regard for tragedy and anguish lacks conviction. In the end, it's just the lurid gimmick of a barking sideshow host.
Vincent Cassel and Albert Dupontel in Irréversible
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Irréversible movie poster
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Dupontel, Bellucci and Cassel and in Irréversible
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