IRREVERSIBLE AT 18
In 2002, Gaspar Noé’s ultra-violent rape-revenge drama IRRÉVERSIBLE caused outrage wherever it played. Now, as it comes of age in the #MeToo era, Total Film revisits its shock and awe to explore whether it’s more relevant than ever before.
In May 2002, Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible arrived at the Cannes Film Festival with all the force of a concrete wrecking ball. The Argentinean-born, French-raised director was already known for his confrontational brand of cinema after short film Carne and his prize-winning feature debut, I Stand Alone. But this backwards-playing revenge drama left reviewers shocked by the visceral scenes of violence [warning: spoilers ahead].
Many fled for the exits. “Film critics are sometimes forced to see movies they know they will dislike,” shrugs the mischievous 56-year-old Noé, when he
meets Total Film almost two decades on. “When you go to Cannes, it’s like the World Cup. People are fighting for their flags. I went to see movies in Cannes and I was whistling because I had a friend who was in competition and I would whistle to destroy all the other movies!”
Irréversible caused more than just a few jeers, though. “It’s easily the most controversial film of the year – maybe the decade,” claimed Tom Ortenberg, president of Lions Gate Releasing, the company that distributed the film in America. This was no hyperbole. Noé drew in European golden couple Vincent Cassel and Monica Bellucci, then hot off L’Appartement, Dobermann and Brotherhood Of The Wolf, reputedly on the promise of making what Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut ‘should’ have been.
PRIMAL FEAR
While that film cast Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in a dreamlike deconstruction of marriage and fidelity, Irréversible played out as an urban nightmare – doing for underpasses what Psycho did for showers, as one critic put it. Opening with the end credits and a cameo appearance by Philippe Nahon, in his role as ‘The Butcher’ from I Stand Alone, warning us that “time destroys everything”, the film begins at the end of the night as chaos and carnage reigns.
Outside seedy Parisian gay S&M club The Rectum, Pierre (Albert Dupontel) is carted off to a police station while friend Marcus (Vincent Cassel), nursing a broken arm, is brought out on a stretcher. Prior events at the venue then unfold; cut to pulsating red strobes and a wailing score by Thomas Bangalter (of Daft Punk fame), Marcus and Pierre search for a rapist named Le Tenia – ‘The Tapeworm’. Pierre then beats a man to death, bashing his face in with a fire extinguisher until the skull splits.
Noé had originally toyed with setting the scene in either a police station or an army barracks. “The guy – the rapist – could’ve been a soldier, a cop, even a fireman… I just wanted the guys to get into a world that was only men against men.” Inspired by William Friedkin’s gay S&M thriller Cruising, a film that shocked Noé when he saw it as a 16 year-old, he chose a real Parisian hardcore gay club, which sprawled across three levels. “Not only were they giving out condoms, but there were also free gloves,” he smirks. “It’s not my world.”
From here, the film moves back again as the explosive Marcus and the cautious Pierre try to find Le Tenia, threatening a former victim for information and stealing a taxi, as they look to avenge the assault of their friend Alex. “As told by Noé it’s just a squalid account of what can happen when macho men egg each other on to revenge under the influence of cocaine and alcohol,” carped The Observer critic Philip French.
The ‘twist’, if that’s what you want to call it, is that Alex turns out to be Bellucci’s character, the girlfriend of Marcus and Pierre’s ex. “That was done deliberately,” says Noé. “There are not many names in French that work for both a boy and a girl.” In Japan, due to pronunciation issues, the title was changed to ‘Alex’, leading many to speculate, incorrectly, that the director was nodding to Malcolm McDowell’s ultra-violent droog in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.
The reason for this violent retribution comes at the halfway point, as Alex leaves a party where Marcus has got out of control. Entering a grimy-looking, deserted underpass, she encounters Le Tenia (Jo Prestia), who pins her down at knifepoint before sadistically raping her and beating her unconscious. All shot in one prolonged, agonising take, lasting around 10 minutes, it’s a jawdropping scene that hasn’t lost any of its power in the intervening 18 years.
“I remember as a kid, I was always scared… as a boy you fear to be raped,” says Noé, reflecting on what drew him to write such a brutal scene. He can still recall watching John Boorman’s Deliverance, in which Ned Beatty’s holidaymaker is raped by a hillbilly. “For all men, Deliverance is an image of total hell.” But nothing in Boorman’s film quite had the sustained savagery of Irréversible,a sequence that was shot six times and rehearsed many more.
“It was like a theatre experience,” says Bellucci, looking back on the scene she shared with Prestia, a French kickboxer-turned-actor. “I knew exactly what I had to do. Jo Prestia, the other actor, he couldn’t touch me… never touched me.” The scene was choreographed expertly. “It would be a disaster if I didn’t know how [to avoid his blows]. He’s a fighter in real life. That’s why he helped us, [he knew] how to move – it was like a dancing scene.”
The gut-wrenching sequence had audiences up in arms. “I got weird reactions sometimes,” says Noé. “People coming out and saying ‘I’m going to smash you,’ or others that say, ‘Be careful, there’s a guy who saw Irréversible who wants to kill you.’ And things like that. I’d say, ‘OK, send him over!’” Bellucci remembers leaving the premiere. “This woman grasped me and said: ‘How can you do a movie like that? You’re so pretty and this film is so horrible!’ She was so mean!”
As the Italian actress notes, those who stormed out missed the point. “The poetry – all the intimate scenes with Vincent – were at the end; and so many people, they came out [early]
because it was so violent, they couldn’t take it.” Indeed, as the film unfolds, winding back in time, it gets softer in tone – to the point we discover that Alex is pregnant and plans to tell Marcus later on that night, a poignant note to end on given what happens to her later.
OUT OF THE SHADOW
At the time, Irréversible was regarded with disdain by some, a misogynistic, homophobic assault on the senses wrapped up in a tricky reverse narrative that echoed Christopher Nolan’s Memento. Yet as Irréversible comes of age, its subject matter – violence against women – has become more visible in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal and the formation of the #MeToo movement. “Today, we can understand better,” says Bellucci. “Because what’s happening right now, it touches subjects that are important.”
Bellucci recalls a conversation she once had with Noé. “I said to Gaspar, ‘Why did you choose me for this movie?’ And he told me, ‘I wanted to see how men, sometimes, want to destroy beauty.’ Of course the film is very violent, but we also talk about love, friendship, relationships, intimacy in a couple, birth, complicity, as well as the lowest form of violence… domination, humiliation, sexual crime, killer’s instinct. This film shows the beauty and the monstrosity of human beings.”
Structuring the film in reverse was always in Noé’s mind, forcing the viewer to piece together this hellish night on the town. He wrote the script chronologically at first, sketching out the 12 scenes with scant detail across just a handful of pages. “Even the rape scene – it was: ‘She gets raped,’” he says. “Then I would read them in the right order, and then reverse the order and make sure the storyline could be perfectly understood in both ways.”
Curiously, last year, Noé re-cut Irréversible chronologically – this time under the tagline “time reveals everything” – and so it begins with Alex discovering she’s with child. “I didn’t think this version could become more emotional than the other one, but the reverse-time structure made the movie very cold or very artsy in a way – half of your brain is trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together,” admits Noé. “In this case, the version is closer to the ground; you feel much more empathy for the characters.”
Noé wants to see both cuts play back-to-back in cinemas, as well as appear on a dual Blu-ray edition. Whatever happens, there can be no question that Irréversible remains a unique moment in cinema history.
“I don’t know anybody in America or France who would do a movie like this nowadays,” he argues. “Which actor nowadays would dare play the character of Vincent Cassel, turning crazy, turning homophobic? Now everybody is asking for a moral answer to be contained in a movie.”
Would Bellucci consider a role like Alex now? “Today, I wouldn’t,” she states. “To make a film like this I’d need to speak with my daughters.” Motherhood has changed her, but she acknowledges that society has shifted too. “Today, when I see my daughters, and that generation, they are much more aware to speak about sensitive subjects, sensitive topics, and also I think that society’s rules are changing. So we are less scared to talk about the subjects and women are less scared to speak out.”
Even now, 18 years on, Noé thinks the point about Irréversible is missed, perhaps because in the original cut it comes so early on. Evidently still in love with Alex, Pierre avenges her rape but kills the wrong man in the club, while Le Tenia can be seen chuckling in the background. “[In movies] the aggressor always gets punished by the guy who decides to take revenge,” says Noé, “but in real life, most of the crimes are totally unpunished. In this case, a crime is added to a crime. It’s about collective failure.”
IRRÉVERSIBLE IS AVAILABLE ON DVD AND BLU-RAY.
‘IT TOUCHES SUBJECTS THAT ARE IMPORTANT TODAY’ Monica Bellucci