MovieMartyr.com - Irreversible

Irreversible, the second feature from Gallic shock auteur Gaspar Noé plays a lot better once you’re able to take it a bit less seriously. Certainly that’s much tougher than it sounds during its first hour or so, which include some of the most graphic and violent scenes that I can recall seeing in so mainstream a movie. It’s not as if the director doesn’t try his darndest to prepare us, however. The portentous opening credits screw with our mind and then each appear on the screen with an unsettling and clamorous jolt on the soundtrack. It’s obvious from the get-go that we’re in the director’s firm grasp, but it’s never for a moment suggested that he’s going to treat us delicately. A few minutes into the tumbling tracking shot that seems to last for the entire film’s running time (digital effects obscure cuts, and even when the scene changes, the momentum is preserved), a character laments, “You know what? Time destroys all things,” giving Irreversible a thesis from which it rarely budges. The effect of the tracking shot creates a movie that feels like a roller coaster ride through a modern, urban updating of hell, and the unbroken shots give this nightmare a lucid, inevitable, and inescapable feel that goes a long way toward selling the horror that’s presented.

Noé’s work in Irreversible is consistently astonishing on a technical and aesthetic level, even if the sound design sometimes grows a bit overbearing, even if that’s its intent. Still, it’s the film’s structure that most impresses. It almost seems a spoiler to mention this, but I imagine it will be common knowledge soon if it’s not already: the plot unfolds backward, roughly taking us from darkest moment to brightest. By reversing the flow of time in this film, he seems to be working toward a denial of fate instead of a surrender to it. By combining the film’s explicit ultimate message with the inherent one in its presentation, the end result ends up an odd melding of textbook nihilism with a startling dose of optimism. That boldly included dose of sanguinity is hard won and somewhat obscured though, and for many audience members such a minor conceit won't be enough after enduring what the movie dishes out. Irreversible seems more than likely to prompt wildly varying reactions from its viewers, with many of those conflicting thoughts occurring in the same individual. As much as I reviled many of its choices early on (the “artistic” use of misogyny and the way the director uses gays, minorities, and transgendered people as shorthand to present a world gone profoundly wrong seem especially dubious), as I came realize that the film is first and foremost an exercise in style, I grew far less impatient with it. By the time Irreversible’s final reel ends, its stone-faced negativity has begun to chip, and as a result the film doesn’t feel as deeply disturbing as it might have been if Noé were the complete masochist that the press has made him out to be. This time out, however, I was glad that the director gave us a glimpse of light or two along the way. His playfulness may compromise his vision of the cruel nature of fate here and there, but it also completely redeems what might have otherwise been an impossible viewing experience.

* * * 1/2

09-20-02

Jeremy Heilman