2004-12-19

I've just seen the French movie Irreversible. It's been a very disturbing experience. It won best film awards in Europe in 2002 - I can see why, it's almost experimental and well crafted. But very disturbing. The movie plays backwards, the way Memento does.

Spoiler warning. Not only does the second sequence in the playback contain a horrifying murder (it was so unexpected and graphic that I just sat watching in disbelief), but a little further down the line the real centrepiece of the movie unfolds as the female lead is raped in a distressing set-piece that is pure agony to watch.

The leads, played by real-life partners Vincent Cassel (Marcus) and Monica Belucci (Alex), and Albert Dupontel as the ex-boyfriend Pierre, did well. Cassell plays Alex's current beau, an impulsive lover with a thirst for drink, drugs, and women. The beautiful Monica Belucci plays the ill-fated Alex whose walk down an inner city pedestrian subway turns into a terrible nightmare. Later we find out she had a dream that echoes that red tunnel. And Dupontel - he is in fact perfect as the cerebral ex-lover (-loser-). He is counterpoint to the more animalistic Cassell, which is thematically important (see next paragraph) because he utterly fails to stop Marcus, and in the end himself commits the worst murder.

The themes aren't difficult to trace. There's the destructive effects of revenge, and the real horror of rape and violence. A descent into hell where one act of violation and violence leads to another and an awful and irreversible mess of blood and destroyed lives is the outcome. The unnerving slur from one scene to the next, where there seems to be no stopping from one end to the other, plays on the normal sequence of happy outcomes: the first scene - the aftermath of the murder - is actually the last in real time, whereas the last scene, one where Alex finds out she's pregnant and dreams a dream of suburban happiness is in fact the first. So we have a happy ending - but it's not the real ending, just the beginning of an unhappy story.

Right there the poster of 2001: A Space Odyssey is shown - twice. As reference it's the key to the theme probably, and unravels it in another sick way - the baby at the end of 2:ASO is the product of millennia of evolution (at the start of 2:ASO we see the apes looking up to the sky); but in Irreversible a baby will now never see the light of day because a bunch of men acted like stupid apes. Irreversible ends with unsettling black and white flashes increasing in speed, that's like a mind panicking nefore it conks out. It also echoes the type of visuals usually reserved for timewarps in space, another message that 2:ASO's idealistic oddysey has just been brought back down to earth.

It's a bleak view of human life. It's been a harrowing experience. I'm gonna pour me some sparkling clear water now.