Interesting movie this - Irreversible
Interesting review this ...
http://www.gotterdammerung.org/film/reviews/i/irreversible.html
Irréversible (Irreversible, 2002)
Gaspar Noé
France
99 min, color, French (English subtitles)
Review © 2003 Branislav L. Slantchev
Time destroys all things.
This is the first time I have ever seen over half the audience marching out in disgust barely 20 minutes into the film. It was also the first time I heard people shouting at the screen (or was it at us, the ones who stayed behind?) that they did not think rape was such an art. (It is not, but the marching ants should be forgiven for completely and irreversibly missing that simple fact.) It was also the first film where people were obviously uncomfortable with being seen in public watching it.
Irreversible is brutal. There is no finessing this (although the guy who wrote the Film Guide capsule summary tried very hard with bullshit like "A precisely constructed masterpiece, Irreversible penetrates into the darkest regions of human action and existentially, biologically, and sociologically explores the nature of free will and the repercussions of existence." Yeah, and Nietzche was my hamster.) nor should there be any attempts to do so. The film is the story of Alex (Monica Bellucci), her lover and soon-to-be father of her child Marcus (Vincent Cassell), and her cerebral and melancholic ex-lover Pierre (Albert Dupontel) who go to a party. She leaves early and gets raped by a guy called Tenia (Jo Prestia), who then beats her into a coma. Marcus and Pierre track the guy down the same night and Pierre kills him by smashing his head repeatedly with a fire extinguisher even though he has spent most of the hunt trying to persuade the explosive Marcus to give up.
Is this just a run of the mill revenge flick that reminded me somehow of Deliverance and I Spit on Your Grave? Despite the lofty intentions of the reviewer I cited above, is this all the film is, even if it is filmed in reverse. Is it any less of an art than just about any secular European piece of art from the last two millennia? The film has a simple point to make: shit happens almost invariably and there is no changing that... There is no reversing that in real life unlike through the medium of art, which can make even the irreversible go from tragic to happy, from death to life, contrary to nature, contrary to society, and contrary to fate.
The film really is a statement about the power art exerts on our rather artless minds. When the film ended with a pulsating white screen and ear-blasting noise I felt strangely serene, having in my mind the last pastoral scene with Alex lying on the grass with children playing around. Knowing full well how the story ended in "real life" was not enough to overcome that feeling. The idyllic sight was tinged with sadness by the general knowledge that all things must perish, and the most beautiful and delicate moments must pass forever.
Strangely, this only made the scene even more precious, perhaps by the desire to capture that fleeting moment and for a brief second experience its own beauty in dying. The pose of the fat naked man at the beginning of the film talking about having spent time in jail for sleeping with his beautiful daughter reminded me of Buddha and hence of Buddhism with its profoundly pessimistic world view that sees existence as suffering and portrays its goal as one of forgetting forever.
At this the film marvelously succeeded for time does destroy all things and only art can halt its destruction and make it somewhat less painful. If one does not seek nirvana, this is as close as one will ever get to happiness and eternity. The progression from chaos to order, very unnatural because it goes contrary to everything we know about the universe, is accentuated by the splendid camera work which depicts these first (although chronologically last) events as a whirlwhind of sights where we can only catch glimpses of events and guess at what's going on mostly from the dialogue. It then becomes steadier as art-time moves forward to describe the "real-time" backward, it becomes calmer, the colors lose much of their red vibrancy, to fade out into a thorough white.
The film is very brutal but so is some of the best art. Violence is always essential to art just like it is essential to life. If it is the violence in leaves torn from the tree by the wind, or a wolf devoring its prey, or a human being killing another, it is all death; and it is death that tinges life with meaning, gives taste to happiness, and makes sadness the color of our monochrome existence. One who insists on being happy by avoiding violence never is and never can be. But he can be safe even if it means safe to die without having lived.
Irreversible reverses the course of events, defies time, and defies death but with the full knowledge that the latter still exists and will always prevail. Yet, strangely, for a split second we enjoy life. The artfully employed reverse story telling makes the "trick" obvious: We only really enjoy it because we know what is going to happen. Otherwise it's the "lived happily ever after" nonsense that is all the more depressing because we all know it's a lie.
January 19, 2003
