People like to talk about Irreversible as "that gruesome movie with the prolonged beating and rape scene," and yes, those two scenes are grueling. So is the movie as a shallowly brilliant intellectual exercise; cold, shifty, pessimistic, despairing, and a lot more meditative and a lot less visceral as it goes along, until it sends us out affected, whether we like it or not.

We begin dark, hovering around outside an apartment, under and over lights and windows. What the hell is going on here? Why would a filmmaker perform such unnecessary torture on his audience? Then we meet the butcher, again, from Noe's past two films, I Stand Alone and Carne, lying naked, covering his crotch, having a discussion. But the camera doesn't stop moving, and it seems to be doing it for no apparent reason, as the butcher states the film's do-or-die mantra, "time destroys everything," and proceeds to elaborate about his past. This is Noe's method of engaging us with himself; of putting his thumb-print on the film and going "This is all attached to me. I'm part of the cycle too, guys. The fate of the dude from I Stand Alone is irreversible, as is mine."

We (you may notice I keep saying "we"; this is very much a movie where you share the experience with the rest of the audience) then go into the gay nightclub Rectum, which admittedly gives off a bit of an aftertaste of homophobia, but who cares: it's a narrative implosion. Any rage at the beginning is allowed to feel weirdly obligatory. And it does, as the camera keeps shaking, we follow Marcus (Vincent Cassel) into the club, he wants La Tenia, and then holy shit. A fire extinguisher. Marcus then searches out a Spanish-sounding she-male prostitute, we find out that was connected to the rape, we see the rape, we see Alex (Monica Bellucci) walking to her fate, we see romance, we see children, a sprinkler, white, and flashes, and we're done.

Irreversible simply feels like your ordinary revenge flick to start with, Noe trying to get all the visceral energy he can out of shoving horrific shit in your face. But the camera becomes calmer. It begins to not accord to the attitude of the characters, but follow them gracefully, like the camera of another long-taker like Sokurov or Hou. The point here is to get inside these thoughtful, confident yet utterly vulnerable people as they discuss the matters of everyday life in a very typical, Rohmer-esque fashion; to compare the kids to the old man who raped his daughter; to compare the quietly insistent walks through the hallway to the furious rushes through the nightclub. We can't control ourselves, neither can Marcus, neither can Noe.

And we come to the conclusion that there is no conclusion, that Noe has doubled back on himself. Alex never got the chance to connect her sex life to her attack, but we did. The children running are a giddy representation of existential fascination, but at the same time they make the I Stand Alone dude's comment "that's a thought," all the more a haunting expression of the inability to transcend our naivete to understand the nature of the universe. Irreversible is never exploitative. It has to gruel us into that place where the past and the future don't matter any longer, as we can't decipher them. Its characterization is not deep, and it's all the better for it. Before the massacres began, Alex and Marcus were just dully glamorous people, unaware of anything except now. Noe leads us on a death march into the present. There is no reason to believe in that, but there is even less reason not to.

1.26.03

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