I Watched It So You Don't Have To: Irreversible

Let’s start with some quick disclaimers: I am a Gaspar Noé fan. I don’t deny that he is a deliberate provocateur, but unlike some other directors who are always trying to shock and appall, my feeling towards Noé is that he just likes seeing what he can put on film. Rather than just being some edgelord-type who believes themselves to be a bastion of free speech and pure artistic expression, Noé seems more like that sniggering kid in the back of class who asks the teacher if he can see Uranus. Whether or not that makes his antics more annoying is really a matter for each individual to figure out of their own.

I bring all this up prior to diving in because Irreversible (2002) is one of the few Gaspar Noé movies that made me roll my eyes. My reaction to it wasn’t concern about it being exploitative or that it was too graphic, but rather that it teetered on the line of just boring–which is not what a director wants to hear when they put an unflinchingly brutal rape scene in their film.

Irreversible is, at its core, a character-driven melodrama. It is propelled forward by one man’s quest to find the assailant who brutally raped and beat his girlfriend. As a mildly clever narrative device, the film starts at the end (where protagonist Marcus, played by Vincent Cassel, has caved in a man’s face with a fire extinguisher) and moves backwards through the night to the bucolic afternoon that preceded these horrific events. This works two-fold in that it adds the disorienting nature of the film, aided also by shaky hand-held shots and dark labyrinthine interiors, as well as making the final scenes (and narrative beginning) more emotional.

Marcus and Alex (Monica Bellucci) are a young couple who live in Paris. The first we see of Alex, she laid out on a gurney, unconscious, and bloodied. As the film unfolds, we are privy to more of the relationship, one of the key details being that Alex left a party early because she was tired of Marcus doing drugs and being flirtatious with other women. Their mutual friend Pierre (Albert Dupontel) used to date Alex, and it’s obvious in the interactions between all three of them that he’s still in love with her. When she is brought up from the subway station in which she was attacked, Pierre is the one who reacts first, wailing at the sight of her.

Due to the structure of the movie, we see a lot of Marcus and Pierre before we ever really interact with Alex. We also know what has happened to her, not just from the sight of the aftermath but from what we hear Marcus and Pierre saying to the many characters trawling the nighttime streets of Paris. What this does is set up a brutal scene long before it even takes place. Now, whether that takes the sting out of it or whether the anticipation makes the rape scene worse is an entirely subjective conversation. But for me, this is where I started to lose interest.

I understand why people think this movie is very effective and why so many people have strong reactions to an almost ten minute, one-shot onscreen sexual assault. As a piece of entertainment and cinema, the first half of Irreversible is what is actually gripping. The odyssey through the underbelly of Paris, the manic, drug-fueled energy of Marcus, the midnight population of partiers and prostitutes is excellent. Even the sedate first scene where two old men are sitting around discussing incest and mocking the gay club next door is intriguing in that it shows the layers in which a city exists; chaos might be raging on the street below but if it’s outside your walls, it doesn’t have anything to do with you. By the time the rape scene happens, we’ve left the interesting world and mission to bear witness to trite couple drama. 

For me, the scene itself was less startling because I knew the extent of it just from watching the movie. The audience knows how terrible it’s going to be, and has the time to steel themselves against it. Then, post-assault (which narratively is pre-assault), we’re casually tossed into the love story of Alex and Marcus; sort of sappy, and a bit eye-rolling. We find out Alex is pregnant, and that Marcus is thrilled at the idea of being a dad even though we can tell from what we just saw that that might be a bigger challenge than he can handle. The film ends with Alex reading in the park on a sunny day and a black title card that reads: “Time Destroys Everything.”

In some ways, I liked the idea of the film running backwards because it plays into a very human response to traumatic situations. Think of how people dealing with a sudden loss will refer to the days before the incident or whatever happened–the oft-repeated “just yesterday.” Just yesterday we were sitting in the park, just yesterday we were planning where we were going to go over the summer, just yesterday when there was a world of potential and not these crippling emotions. From that perspective, I like the structure. But there’s another side to it that ruined the experience a bit for me in that I lost interest by the time we got to any real form of character and relationship development. 

Having this reaction to the structure begs the question (my favorite phrase) would I feel this way had the movie been told start to finish? It’s a good question because I don’t know. The happy scenes in Irreversible are supposed to highlight the viciousness and randomness of the attack but they felt like overkill to me. Sure, saying that happiness and love felt gratuitous in a movie with a nine-minute rape scene might not make any sense at all, but it seemed like Noé wanted the ending to be extra sad. The way for him to do that was show how in love and glowing Alex was before this all happened. I almost wish we didn’t see any of Alex’s life prior to the attack because it doesn’t matter if she was pregnant or barren, bursting with joy or depressed beyond belief; she didn’t deserve what happened to her because no one deserves that.

On the other hand, it would be easy for someone to say that showing Alex only in the context of the assault and its aftermath is removing her autonomy as a character–turning her into a two-dimensional character whose purpose is to spur on the men. Which is not untrue. I think Noé was trying to bring as much depth to her as possible in a short period of time; I just can’t help but feel like her depth and pain being measured in romantic relationships and babies is reductive.

Essentially, I liked half of Irreversible, and genuinely don’t know if I would like it anymore if the above critiques were met. I didn’t find it that upsetting, I wasn’t particularly moved by it but I also didn’t hate it. Like all other films in this column, I do encourage other people to see it and judge for themselves. Noé is an unusual filmmaker and an acquired taste, so it’s not surprising to not love every single thing he puts out. Irreversible, a film that starts with a bolt of electricity–a fire extinguisher to the face–and ends with a fatalistic title card, has a lot of potential but just like the yesterdays of so many tragedies, the potential is swallowed up in misery. What’s left is just enough energy to limp along towards the finish line.