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How Irreversible made me feel like shit
. . . by Emily Witt

Last week I took a late bus back from Boston by myself. I arrived in Providence around midnight, without the cash to take a cab up the hill and not wanting to bother anybody to come and pick me up. It was snowing and I was wearing about as much winter clothing as a person could wear. On the walk from Kennedy Plaza to my house on Arnold Street, I was addressed two times. The first was a simple “Hey little girl” from across the street. The two men were waiting for a bus and were not going anywhere. Nothing to worry about, I kept walking, head down.

The second provocation was more disconcerting. I had made it to Benefit Street and a car slowed down next to me. The window rolled down and the male voice inside yelled “Ugly bitch” into the snowy night. I kept walking toward my house, head still down but more tense this time. They sped up and drove away.

The people in the car wanted to remind me of something that I might have thought I could forget. Yes it is stupid to walk around alone at night. Yes I am lucky that, in spite of taking public transportation home in deserted hours in large cities around the world, I have never been harmed. It is stupid, I have been lucky, I should stop. I tell myself this often. As a woman, I should know better. I could get mugged, assaulted, banged up. This does not scare me enough. It should. Women that pretend they are invincible need to learn, need to be reprimanded by angry voices in anonymous cars. Did I think for a minute that I could forget the fear of being raped? Stupid, stupid girl.

As if I needed a filmic representation of this lesson, it exists in Irreversible. A French film that in its hour-and-forty minutes left me a weepy emotional pulp, it has the possibly unintended consequence of being one of the more important films about gender, about violence, and about the stagnancy of social roles I have ever seen. Told in reverse narrative, the film begins with its violent finale, receding backwards into its calmer beginnings in a series of ten-minute scenes, each a single take. It opens with the actor Phillipe Nahon, who played the main character (The Butcher) in I Stand Alone, director Gaspar Noe’s first feature about a disgruntled man who fantasizes about committing incest with his daughter and beats his pregnant girlfriend. Nahon sits half-naked in a bleak apartment carrying on a conversation with a friend. The scene is a preface: we hear the sound of sirens from the nightclub below. He states, “Time destroys everything,” and the camera moves out the window and down the side of the wall, resting upon a mass of cops milling around a crime scene and a gurney bearing a battered Vincent Cassel. Thus the story begins, this scene of confusion explained in its complexity by the scenes that preceded it in narrative and follow it in time.

The viewer is thrown quickly into the sweatbath of Le Rectum, a gay S&M club through which the character Marcus (Vincent Cassel) frantically seeks La Tenia, the man who has raped his girlfriend Alex (Monica Bellucci.) Shot hand-held and in a single take (like each step, Noe takes us back in time) his search is video game-like as he knocks out pawing clubgoers mid-blow job and avoids sweaty pleas to “fistez-moi”. He is accompanied by Pierre (Albert Dupontel), Alex’s pathetic ex-boyfriend who is equally ready to avenge her. What follows is the spectacle of a man (the suspected La Tenia) getting his head bashed in with a fire extinguisher, a series of images only slightly more nauseating than the music that has been playing in the background. We go further back in time, and in the first 40 minutes of the film successive scenes recount the two men’s search for the club where the rapist has gone, Marcus’s discovery of Alex as she is wheeled into an ambulance, and Alex’s rape itself, a gruesome ten minute scene that left me in tears and ready to vomit.

In the last third of the film (and the beginning of the story) the violence subsides. The frantic camera work and dark streets recede into slow tracking shots and well-lit domestic spaces. We see Alex and Marcus having an argument at a party. The triangle of Alex-Marcus-Pierre is depicted as an uneasy relationship between lovers and ex-lovers as they are on the subway. We see Alex and Marcus as a loving couple in bed together (particularly effective as Bellucci and Cassel are married in real life). The chaotic violence of the first forty minutes of the film tinges the remainder with a knowing sense of regret, of disgust and reprehension, particularly potent in its normalcy and comfort.

My first reaction to the film was that the rape scene was horribly unnecessary. I was as upset when Bellucci’s character entered the highway overpass as I was during the rape itself. I did not need to see it to understand it. It felt almost threatening, particularly as the scenes following it were so typical–going out with some friends, wearing your party clothes (which are not exactly burkas for the most part), and for those of us who should know better, wanting to take off early and departing for home alone. It seemed to be reprimanding Alex’s character for her naivety, and with it the female audience for theirs.

However, depicting rape is certainly not advocating it. There is no fetishization of what is done to Alex on film, and I would venture to say that Noe’s depiction of violence is important in foregrounding the discourse behind it with the emotional impact he does. In opting to seek a brainless and destructive revenge rather than follow Alex to the hospital, Marcus and Pierre make it clear that they care less about her well-being than about their own failure as the protectors, the possessors, the patriarchs.

As the film regresses in time, the violence of the rape is echoed in the dialogue between an apparently loving couple and amongst friends. We see Marcus acting like a prick to Alex, complaining about being tied to the apron strings as he snorts drugs and acts like a general dickhead. The pathetic Pierre obsesses over the fact that Alex has orgasms with Marcus but did not with him. At the party he moons around her, superficially comforting her in the face of Marcus’s shenanigans although clearly still miffed about the whole break-up thing, perhaps entertaining the vain hope that he could still figure out how to push her buttons “the right way.”

In the end, Noe’s message is that violence against women is not simply the physical act, it is imbedded in the discourse and roles of the everyday. The film, in its totality, places at the forefront[s] a social critique that is far beyond mere sensationalism. At times it felt heavy-handed, with the men such exaggerated chauvinists, and Alex’s character as the introspective and maternal female is pushed a bit too far, but in spite of this the narrative remained effective due to the fine acting of Cassel, Belluci and Dupontel.

In reading reviews of Irreversible, other critics have demoted the film as exploitative, insipid, irresponsible, and unnecessary generally based upon the content of the two most violent scenes. For a movie that affects men and women in a potentially different way, I was surprised (but not really) to find only one review out of ten in the mainstream press that was written by a woman. I would venture to say that Noe’s depiction of rape is less exploitative than the traditional objectification of women on film, which is effective both in its subtlety and the lack of criticism against it. As an audience we are so used to seeing women in films as mindless bodies, as reactors rather than actors, as accoutrements to male protagonists, that we rarely notice what is often subordination and violence against feminine characters. This is certainly not limited to Hollywood films, as even an independent like Spike Lee’s 25th Hour leaves us with female characters that seem gorgeously lobotomized (Did Rosario Dawson even have a head?). In its foregrounding of gendered social roles, Noe’s use of violence acts to question rather than purvey them.
The most impressive aspect of Irreversible ends up being Noe’s talent. He wrote, directed, shot and edited the film’s series of impressive single shots. The pace of the camera’s movement seems to slow as the actors around it recede into the normalcy of calm from the frenzy of the film’s violent beginnings. The final shot is impeccable in its sheer zen-like beauty.

It is difficult to recommend a film like this. Almost a third of the audience walked out at Cannes and reportedly people have even fainted. However, I would place it among the most important films out this year in its very skill at provoking such emotion. Irreversible was difficult to watch not only because I generally dislike violent content in films, but because the social situation of its occurrence felt so upsettingly real. The fear of rape can determine decisions as mundane as when and how we leave a party to with who and where we take vacations. It is everything from a weapon of war to a form of social dominance. If gender is the ultimate binary, the specter of rape keeps it in place. Irreversible states this simply and horribly.

Emily Witt B’03 wishes Quaaludes were still legit.

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