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French hiss
Likely the worst movie of the year, "Irreversible" exhibits fascist, gay-bashing tendencies, goes backwards for no reason, dizzies you with aimless camera work, and covers its banality with a veneer of pseudointellectual bullshit.
By JOSHUA TANZER
Offoffoff.com
"Irreversible" is going to be hard to beat as the worst movie of the year, even with 10 months remaining in the competition. It sucks in so many ways, it's hard to know which one to start with.
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| | | IRREVERSIBLE | Written and directed by: Gaspar Noé.
Cast: Monica Bellucci, Vincent Cassel, Albert Dupontel, Philippe Nahon, Jo Prestia, Stˇphane Drouot, Jean-Louis Costes, Mourad Khima.
In French with English subtitles.
Related links: Official site |
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Okay, first of all, the movie goes backwards, in feeble imitation of "Memento," "Betrayal," and the outstanding Korean film "Peppermint Candy." Now, the thing about stories that go backwards is there's got to be a mystery at the beginning of the story, which becomes the end of the movie. Instead of cause and effect, it's effect and cause. Not how will it end, but how did it start?
"Irreversible" starts with a scene of extreme violence, as Marcus (Vincent Cassel) rampages through a barely-lit gay bondage bar called Le Rectum looking for someone called Le Tenia. The scene culminates in the hideous murder of some random gay guy, who is not Le Tenia, by Marcus's friend Pierre.
So what chain of events propelled Marcus and his friend to this destiny? Well, normally it would be bad form to reveal the ultimate answer, as I'm about to do, but it's only a couple scenes later that we find out. His curvaceous girlfriend Alex (played by his real-life wife, Monica Bellucci) is raped and beaten senseless by an immigrant stranger in another horrendously violent scene, and he's mad with rage. (The extremely harsh rape scene might be defended on the grounds that it dramatizes what a horrifying crime rape is, but, given the fact that the whole thing is foretold by the backwards format, it's gratuitous before it even starts.)
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Once you know the cause of the jarring scene at the end, the suspense is over. The whole movie is over. What else are you going to show on your backwards journey — how happy-happy-happy these characters were before the randomly occurring rape? Well, yes, that's what we see for the rest of the film. They party, they snort coke, they lie around in bed, and they take the subway. They have a tedious, thoroughly de-eroticized but quintessentially French philosophical debate on the subway about orgasms. The end is foreshadowed repeatedly, which is pointless because it's already been shown. I guess you'd call that postshadowing.
So if the story had been told forwards rather than backwards, it would at least have fit together structurally. Showing it backwards was nothing but artistically pretentious stupidity.
Filmmaker Gaspard Noˇ — abetted by the actors, who improvised much of their dialogue — tries to justify his artistic pretensions through pseudointellectual pretensions. "I was reading a book," Alex mentions, a propos of nothing, in a way that's supposed to show that she's not some dumb bimbo but some brainy bimbo. What did she learn from the book? That "the future is already written." We're also informed by another character that "time destroys all." Oooh, that's so deep.
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| | Much of the movie is shot using what can only be described as the drunken monkey technique. But perhaps I'm being unfair to monkeys. |
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Even more wrong is the movie's misanthropy. I may be interpreting it differently from what was intended, but the rampage through the gay bar is so full of ignorant gay pervert stereotypes that the scene would simply never have gotten made in this country. Even as they're being pummeled by the righteously enraged Cassel, they're whining, "Wait, fist me!" ("Fiste-moi!"), and they just stare in fetishistic fascination as one of their number's skull is crushed with repeated blows of a fire extinguisher. American filmmakers would think eight or ten times about whether they were justifying gay-bashing with a scene like this, but not the makers of "Irreversible." And I think that's just one example of the film's arrogance toward women, immigrants and people in general.
The inhumanity shows up in the flimsiness of the characters as well. We have no insight into what, if anything, these people are made of. Their lives are empty, their talk is inane, they like to party. By the end — excuse me, the beginning — of the movie, we have nothing at stake in their fate. The friend Pierre, in particular, is a cipher — a nebbishy professor about whom the only thing we know is that he's sexually inadequate and insecure — and the fact that this pathetic and inconsequential character steps in and commits the heinous murder drains the story of meaning even further. We only sense that Noˇ has his own reasons for gleefully sending these individuals — his everymen, or maybe his ubermen — out to slaughter their inferiors. It feels like a case of crypto-fascist wish fulfillment.
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And finally there's cinematic pretension — much of the movie is shot using what can only be described as the drunken monkey technique. To enhance the movie's sense of edginess, the camera meanders aimlessly over ceilings and sides of buildings and into total darkness, as if some simian with no idea what to point a camera at got hold of it and waved it around until someone distracted him with a banana. But perhaps I'm being unfair to monkeys. If you put an infinite number of monkeys behind an infinite number of cameras, perhaps one of them would eventually make "Citizen Kane" but none would make a film so intentionally awful as "Irreversible." That takes volition.
This concludes our review for the straight-female and gay-male portions of the Offoffoff audience. The rest of you, however, will still have one question on your minds if you've seen the previews: So do we get to see Monica Bellucci naked or what? And the answer is, yes, quite a bit. In fact, that's probably the only reason this stinker ever got released, and it's the only reason you should even remotely consider seeing it. Now, one thing I could suggest is to head down to your local 38-plex and buy tickets for some other movie that ends half an hour before "Irreversible," enjoy your movie, and then sneak in to catch the end of this one — but of course that would be wrong. Perhaps you might wait for it to come onto cable, set your VCR to tape the last half-hour while you sleep, and then enjoy the view from the next day until the end of time. Just don't give the filmmakers a dime of your money, not for this garbage.
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MARCH 6, 2003
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Reader comments on Irreversible:
Joshy... from monica belluci, May 24, 2003
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