September 16, 2002
		January 16, 2003

Irreversible
(Mars Films) Rated NYR
Release Date: January 1, 2003

IRREVERSIBLE, however, is a whole different ballgame.  Placed by many in the same realm as Ken Park, since it includes a 7, 8 or 9 minute rape scene (everyone seems to report a different length). But Gaspar Noe, brutal though his film is, is working on some very interesting ground.

Let me start with some of the big surprises, not on a story level, but on an ethical level.

The infamous rape scene is done as tastefully as an anal rape could be done.  It is horrifying and it is upsetting, but Noe is actually quite clever in objectifying Monica Bellucci in that scene as little as possible.   Her breasts are never exposed.  There is never a suggestion of foreplay or any enjoyment on her part.  In fact, he also takes away all the traditional arguments that plague rape victims… she screams throughout, she keeps fighting even with a knife as a threat, she says “no” in every way possible and when she has the opportunity, she tries her best to escape.  And that’s when the most violent part of the scene takes place.  For me, it was infinitely more horrible to see the beating. 

But while covering Bellucci and not trying to titillate, Noe demands that the audience pay attention.  The rape takes place in a long street underpass and Noe makes sure that we know that someone might turn up at the end of that hallway at any moment.  So we can’t look away, as most of us would. 

But there is a lot more to this film than the rape scene. Noe seems to be, most shockingly, a moralist… perhaps a right-wing moralist.  Noe offers both the rape victim and her boyfriend, a runaway locomotive in his own right, the opportunities to make better choices… the opportunity to change what is, by the time the story starts, irreversible. 

If you can get past the horrible violence, which starts right at he beginning of the film, long before the rape sequence, there is a story here that wants to make you think… and unlike Ken Park, not just about the idea that teens are rebellious, horny and look good naked.  Ms. Bellucci and Vincent Cassell (as the boyfriend) are better looking and more interesting sexually than any of the teens in Ken Park.  Yet, even when they are having sex in a romantic, sweet setting, there is more emotional richness and context here than in any of the show-off machinations of Clark and Lachman’s excremental opus. 

Of course, Noe is a show off too.  And his camera work tends to cross the border from archly creative to repetitively boring at some points.  But there is so much more there than the pieces that make good copy.  Irreversible is a movie in which after we have seen Monica Bellucci brutally raped and then seen her unrelentingly sexy in a slip of a dress, sheerly covering her singular ripeness, a character asks whether a man who really loved her would even let her leave the house looking like that and whether her man got off on her looking like that in public.  And, as an audience, we ponder it all… sexism, feminism, freedom of expression, the definitions of love, what we really want and what we say we want and so much more.  That is something special.  And Irreversible is just that… something very difficult and something very special indeed.