The rape scene is reported to be ten minutes long, but no one ever checks their watch. Whatever the exact time is, it’s long enough. Alex (Monica Bellucci) walks through a Parisian underpass, red-lit like the road to hell. Two minutes later, she is sprawled face down against the gritty, concrete floor while a hand muffles her screaming, her crying. The camera sits on the floor, impassively watching as she stretches her clawed hand out, asking for relief. We cannot help. We are just the audience.
The rape scene is one long take. When a cut mercifully arrives, it is only to show Alex’s face slammed repeatedly into the ground. At first, it is shocking and distressing, then numbing. Jean-Luc Godard once wrote of the morality of the tracking shot, and fellow Frenchman Gaspar Noe’s new film, Irreversible, questions the morality of the extended take. Is it right to watch this simulated act of sexual violence? Is it right to sit in cinematic consumption as a man gets his head chipped away, piece by piece, by the battering of a fire extinguisher? For many, not only is it wrong, it’s unbearable.
The rape scene is the crux of the film. Nasty, brutish and long, it provides motivation for what follows and illuminates that which comes prior. It’s slightly more complicated, though, because the movie goes in reverse, like Memento, only more smoothly. There are no jarring fade-outs or reprisals of previously seen material. Composed of a dozen or so single-shot scenes lasting from three to 15 minutes long, Irreversible gives the impression of seamlessness. Noe’s camera swings down or swoops completely around and suddenly drops in at an earlier point in the story.
And this is a deceptively simple story. Alex and Marcus (Vincent Cassel) are in love. One night they venture out to a party with Pierre (Albert Dupontel), Alex’s ex. The lovebirds have a fight, she leaves, gets raped and the two men look for revenge, finding it within the bowels of The Rectum, a cunningly named gay S&M club. There, someone gets their head dismantled. End of film. Actually, beginning of film.
By giving us the conclusion first, Noe presents action devoid of motivation. No reason is given for the unmatchable violence that opens the film. The definition of a provocateur, he seems to find pleasure in smacking his audience in the face with blunt images of humanity at its worst. Noe’s previous film, I Stand Alone, gave us a butcher who beat his pregnant wife in the stomach before walking out with a gun in search of his institutionalized daughter. Three-quarters of the way through, a warning flashes on screen giving audience members averse to violence thirty seconds to flee the theater. No such disclaimers appear this time.
None are needed, though. Those with weak constitutions, objections against violence or rosy outlooks on life are well advised to avoid Irreversible. But, every reprehensible moment in the film is essential, combining in a film far greater than any of its parts. Only by showing the depths of humanity can Noe deliver his last half-hour, the pinnacle of love and tenderness.
When it was screened at Cannes, there were multiple walkouts at the halfway point. Maybe they didn’t know what they were getting into. Foreknowledge, though, requires stamina and the responsibility to remain until the end. Especially this end.
It’s hard to ever remember a movie that reaches out to such extremes, simultaneously the most disturbing and most beautiful work all at once. The final twenty minutes have Alex and Vincent at home, lying lazily in bed with a post-coital glow. The affection between the two actors, married in real life, allows respite from the horrors that come before. The vision of Noe’s optimism makes us float even though we’ve seen these angels degenerate into beasts. Irreversible is smart and confrontational. It fights to engage and nauseate us. Any hope of remaining passive is foolish.
“I’m not an object, you know,” Alex says near the end. At first, this is impossible to believe. She has walked around in a dress that resembles nothing more than crepe paper over her pert body and is violated to the point of dehumanization. In the film’s master stroke, blame is thrown on us for her rape. She’s gorgeous. We want to look at her. Noe knows this. Watch this, he says. This is the result of objectifying women. This is the result of your arousal at the sexual being I have given you. It’s an ingenious cruelty that is strangely moralistic.
Irreversible is full of gimmicks-reverse chronology, semi-pornographic violence and shots that apparently never end. The overall effect is no trick, however. The film is ugly and incredible and must be seen by those who can handle it. The tagline reads, “Time destroys all things.” Thankfully for everyone, it also recoups them.
