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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER SUGGESTED QUEUE: IRREVERSIBLE (2001)

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DIRECTED BY: Gaspar Noé

FEATURING: , , Albert Dupontel, Philippe Nahon

PLOT: A reflection on the destructive nature of time, centered around a ruthless sexual abuse and a vicious revenge.

COMMENTS: First things first: I balk at calling Gaspar Noé’s classic Irreversible a “weird” movie. Experimental, brutal, shocking, or thought-provoking are all more suitable adjectives. Its “weirdest” element, apart from its anxiety-inducing quasi-infrasound and some improvised dialogue, is perhaps that the movie exists in two versions: a disorienting one where the story is told in reverse and a clearer one, premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2019, that retains the chronological order of the events.

Another aspect worth bearing in mind is Noé’s intention to blur the boundaries between the real and the fictional. At the time of filming, leads Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel, both of whom offer superb performances as young couple Alex and Marcus, were actually married As a result, their scenes together feel tender and sweet, and they are imbued with genuine love—a stark contrast to the gruesome violence pervading most of the film.

Because, despite all the stylistic experimentation, Irreversible remains grounded in disturbingly realistic ideas. In an interview, Noé bleakly revealed that the film was meant to represent the fact “that people are animals who control themselves to survive in a civilized environment, and not the other way around.” In effect, while the movie is far from being a gorefest, the atavistic behavior that characters display in some of the sequences is chilling. When the outbursts of violence take place, the viewer can’t help but stare in astonishment at the dark underbelly of human nature presented on screen. The horror of the film lies in these very actions and in the realization that they can be triggered any time under the right circumstances.

The central conflict of the movie (spoilers ahead) exemplifies such unhinged violence. It is also literally the central scene, the one that doesn’t change its location irrespective of which version of the film one watches, and the one that is hotly debated among commentators who are undecided whether it’s one of the most powerful scenes in cinema history or simply gratuitous onscreen shock value. It is a crude, ten-minute static shot depicting Belluci’s rape and beating in an underground tunnel, whose red walls become a symbol of hell. This scene constitutes the trigger for Cassel’s revenge on the perpetrator, but it also works on a level beyond the screen, the long static shot directly making us viewers witness to a cruel reality, rendering us impotent before it, just as the victim is.

The other gruesome scene of the film takes place at the beginning or end, depending on the version, at a gay bar called The Rectum (fans of psychoanalysis may find links to the above-mentioned tunnel), where the rapist, referred to as Le Tenia, is blithely clubbing and having fun with other men. Cassel and his friend burst into the bar and, Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER SUGGESTED QUEUE: IRREVERSIBLE (2001) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: DON’T LOOK BACK [NE TE RETOURNE PAS] (2009)

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DIRECTED BY: Marina de Van

FEATURING: Sophie Marceau, , Andrea Di Stefano

PLOT: As she struggles to write an autobiographical novel, a writer with childhood amnesia finds that everything she sees—her apartment, her husband’s face, and even her own image in the mirror—is changing into something unfamiliar.

Still from Don't Look Back [Ne te retourne pas] (2009)

 

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  The sophomore effort by rising bizarre star Marina de Van arrives as a slight disappointment.  The opening segments are disquieting without being bang-up weird, and by the end the mystery is resolved too completely, leaving nothing to linger in the mind.

COMMENTS:  Don’t Look Back mines the psychological terrain of jamais vu: the strange feeling you get when you enter a room you’ve been in hundreds of times and everything suddenly looks different, or when you look at the face of the person you’ve slept next to for a decade and see a stranger.  Sophie Marceau begins as Jeanne, the woman who finds that her kitchen furniture has been rearranged, the Paris city streets are no longer familiar, and her husband and children are making strange hand gestures when she’s not looking.  Initially she just seems paranoid, but the incidents keep building until finally her entire family has been replaced by different actors whom she doesn’t recognize, and we’re convinced there’s something seriously amiss inside Jeanne’s mind.  The breaking point comes when she looks into the mirror and sees an unfamiliar face staring back at her—on her left side, she still looks like Sophie Marceau, but the right side of the image is the face of Monica Bellucci.  Based on a clue she finds in a photo, Jeanne (now being played by Bellucci rather than Marceau) travels to an Italian village where she finds herself in a situation that’s almost the reverse of Paris: she recognizes the faces she sees as those of her husband, mother, etc., but no one she encounters seems to have a clue as to who she is.   It’s an intriguing premise, and the film is sincere, well-executed, and clever—and it’s also one of those movies where, by the end, you’re puzzled why it’s turned out merely solid rather than exceptional.  Part of the problem is the pace.  The movie starts slow, and keeps piling up weird incidents long after we’ve gotten the point that something’s cracked inside Jeanne and are anxious to get moving towards some answers.  The use of horror movie music cues to inform us that something uncanny is taking place is overdone and gauche, almost to the point of parody.  Containing two episodes of traumatically interrupted intercourse and more than a hint of incest, the movie flirts with ideas of sexual repression and perversion that, in the end, turn out to have nothing to do with Jeanne’s psychology.  And although the movie gets into a nice weird groove in the run up to the finale, where Jeanne now seems to be turning from Bellucci into a third actress at a wild village party, the script explains itself too completely by the end.  Although the solution to the mystery is intellectually satisfying, it doesn’t provide the emotional chills and thrills it should.  Looking back on the “clues” scattered through the earlier parts of the film, you realize that many of them didn’t add up; they were just arbitrary strange occurrences that let you know something was off but didn’t assist you to guess what it was, and so you feel cheated.  That said, the ending is unexpected and should keep you interested enough to keep watching.  The half Marceau/half Bellucci effect is truly novel and uncanny.  And the performances by the two French beauties are superlative: Marceau sets up the character, but it’s remarkable how Bellucci picks her up mannerisms so that you never question that this is the same character inhabiting two different bodies (to a lesser extent, the same compliment can be applied to Andrea Di Stefano and Thierry Neuvic, the two men who play Jeanne’s husband).  The end result is not a disaster, but given everything the movie apparently has going in its favor, it’s underwhelming.

De Van’s previous film was In My Skin [Dans Ma Peau] (2002), a shocking and mysterious portrait of a woman’s obsessive self-mutilation.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a traumatic and reductive incident from Marceau/Bellucci’s past is to blame—hence the title—which makes the entire film feel like the laborious setup for a dopey Twilight Zone twist.”–Mike D’Angelo, Onion A.V. Club (Cannes screening)