Strobing white light (from the mouth of infinity?)
A woman, Alex (Monica Belucci), lies in the park reading a book. Children play. All is calm.
Later Alex takes a pregnancy test. It's positive.
Alex and her partner Marcus (Vincent Cassel) lie in bed after making love. Their friend Pierre, Alex's former lover, telephones. His car has broken down so they'll have to to take the metro to the party.
On the metro they goof about, Pierre quizzing Alex on Marcus's qualities as a lover – what's he got that I haven't?
At the party Marcus takes assorted drugs and makes a fool of himself. He and Alex argue and she leaves.
Crossing the road via the subway, Alex is attacked by La Tenia, a pimp. After sodomising her, he punches her and smashes her face into the floor. (The whole assault takes place in real time; if you watch carefully you can actually see a man enter the tunnel and, after hesitating for a moment, silently exit.)
Marcus and Pierre leave the party just in time to see a comatose Alex being taken away in an ambulance.
The police question Pierre, but seem to offer little comfort.
Two local gangsters approach Marcus and Pierre, offering to lead them to the rapist so they can get revenge.
Using an ID card dropped in the tunnel the four men go in search of their quarry. They do not find La Tenia, however, rather the transsexual prostitute who was with him. When Marcus threatens her/him with a knife he/she tells them about La Tenia and the Rectum, a gay S&M dungeon.
Marcus and Pierre find the rectum, where Marcus quizzes the inhabitants about the whereabouts of La Tenia. When they finally encounter him he plays dumb. Marcus attacks another man, whom he wrongly believes to be La Tenia, and has his arm broken. Pierre picks up a fire extinguisher (evidently it's okay to run a labyrinthine torture garden so long as you're not in breach of fire regulations) and smashes it repeatedly into the man's face.
The police arrive to take away Pierre and Marcus. Meanwhile in a nearby apartment two men – one the Butcher from Carne and Seul Conte Tous – wonder what the noise is about.
The credits roll; backwards.
All this, however, is presented by writer/director/cinematographer/editor/total auteur Gaspar Noe in reverse chronological order, starting with the aftermath and working backwards so that the film ends on a more joyous, if ironic, tone.
The result, as most commentators have already pointed out, is like a nastier version of Memento .
The unusual temporal structure means Irreversible grows on repeat viewing, as you notice more of the allusions like the posters for Kubrick's The Killing (temporal structure) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (note Pierre's repeated exasperation at Marcus's "ape-like" antics); that Marcus can't feel his arm when he wakes up, or Alex's The Vanishing -like dream of a red tunnel splitting into two.
The challenge for the typical spectator is, however, likely to be getting through the film the first time, given the range of obstacles – including vertiginous what-is-going-on-here? camerawork and basso profondo subliminal sound design inspired by the use of ultra low frequencies to quell riots and upset stomachs, along with the reverse-chronology and hard-core violence – that Noe puts in your way.
A number of things continue to bother one about Irreversible on second viewing. Odd though it may seem, the violence – physical, verbal and otherwise – is not one of them, being so utterly devoid of sensationalism and affect in its (re)presentation.
The two things that bother me, then, are the ways in which one could interpret the films philosophical propositions, subsumed within its slogan "Time Destroys Everything", and its handling of deviant sexuality.
Suppose we take seriously that our fates are predetermined and presaged by dreams. Mix this with the notion that dreams are (?:un|sub)conscious wish fulfilment and Alex's comments on the metro that Pierre's weakness as a lover was his emphasis on his partner's pleasure rather than his own selfish gratification, and we start to get perilously close to a situation in which "she asked for it", with La Tenia merely another pawn in the cosmic game, one who fulfils his role as agent of dark liberation…
Okay, maybe it needs a few near-psychopathic leaps of sophistry, but the reading is a definite possibility. (Maybe the film is actually more dangerous to us intellectuals rather than the proverbial factory workers – we don't have to worry about their being able to think about it beyond the rape is bad message ;-))
At a rather more mundane level Irrersible the whole handling of La Tenia and the denizens of The Rectum feels more cowardly than confrontational: Go for an easy target subculture and then show it in the most expressionistic, bargain-basement clichéd manner possible. Alas, I don't know if any groups of leather boys picketed the film or complained that it misrepresented (come to think of it, can you do other than mis-represent, at some level?) them…
No(e), I won't let the director remove my freewill to play god and make up my own mind about the film. Remove freewill from the equation and we all get fucked in the ass…
Other than these refusals to commit, one respects the bravery of the author. But perhaps his husband-and-wife performers deserve even more credit for taking what could easily be career suicide roles…
Copyright © K H Brown 2002-2005
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