Irreversible

Lions Gate Films

After a controversial run in Europe, Gaspar Noe’s shockingly violent film Irreversible opens in North America this weekend. Since its European release, the film has become notorious as a kind of censorship stomping ground, reviving the age-old debate of art over content. The film itself, however, deserves more.

At a recent screening of the film at the Harvard Film Archive, over fifty percent of the audience quietly left the theatre near the half-way mark, during a 10-minute rape sequence that forms the core of the film. Told in a reverse narrative a la Memento, Irreversible follows Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and his friend Pierre (Albert Dupontel) as they search a bizarrely hostile gay club for the man who raped Marcus’s girlfriend Alex (Monica Bellucci). After the incredible revenge is taken, Noe backs up to depict the rape, and the final sequence of the film is a long, tender love scene between Alex and Marcus.

All of the principals give remarkable performances. Cassel in particular is excellent in his walking portrayal of masculine vengefulness. In the later scenes, he provides an interesting foil to Dupontel’s mild-mannered, sensitive Pierre, and Bellucci’s natural calm. Irreversible is certainly not a “character” movie, but it relies heavily on the looming generalizations it makes about its free-floating inhabitants, and about the agression inherent in male environments.

Unlike the gimmicky Memento, Noe uses the reverse narrative technique for thematic purposes in place of its common use as a flashy glitch in convention. The film’s assertion that “time destroys everything” is utilized visually in Noe’s dazzling transitional phrases. He finds a relationship between the camera’s motion and the darkened landscape the film inhabits to establish an almost ethereal sense of discontinuity in the film’s temporal projection of its characters. The intense violence of the first half of the film is thus more movingly juxtaposed, as Noe shows us how time, and the misconception of time, can create a flawed perception of reality. Noe posits that perhaps by reversing time we can locate happiness, or would it only show us the irreversible effects of human nature? This question is one for the audience, and is what makes Irreversible a fascinating, if disturbing visual experience. —Clint J. Froehlich

Irreversible screens at Kendall Square Cinema at 2:40, 5, 7:30 and 10 p.m.