The poverty of Gasper Noe's shock tactics.
The career of Gaspar Noe boils down to one sentence: "Bet I can shock you." It's a bet all but the most sadistic and juvenile moviegoers are bound to lose. The last Noe film to cause a stir in the states was 1998's I Stand Alone, the highlight of which was a scene where the hero, a bigoted prole thug, tried to give his pregnant mistress an abortion by hitting her in the stomach until her baby died. His latest, Irreversible, contains a heated confrontation in a strobe-lit gay S&M club that ends with a man's head getting bashed open like a piñata, and a scene where the heroine is raped at knifepoint for nine straight minutes, then beaten to a bloody pulp.
If you view movies as the artistic equivalent of roller coasters or spicy food-a morally neutral thing to test yourself against-you'll probably go see Irreversible just so you can talk about it (and brag about how it wasn't as shocking as you'd heard). But I sincerely hope you won't see Noe's movie, because I don't think directors like Noe should be encouraged. In fact, my first impulse after leaving Irreversible was not to review it at all. I feared I'd fall into the same old trap laid by every shallow student artist who ever believed talent and the ability to get attention were the same thing.
But it's hard to resist Noe's bait. The film epitomizes the attention-seeking antics that have fueled art movies for close to three decades. Ever since the Vietnam era, when films like Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch, A Clockwork Orange, Straw Dogs and The Exorcist commanded public attention through violence, the world hasn't been able to go six months without a fresh cinematic outrage. Sometimes the outrages seem defensible-or discussable-and sometimes they don't. (Good luck finding anyone who'll defend the sadism in Magnum Force or Cruising.) But they keep coming. The names have changed-Dressed to Kill, Scarface, Blue Velvet, RoboCop-but the headlines have not.
The tenor of outrage changed in 1994, when Pulp Fiction, a postmodern collage of profanity, violence and surreal conversation, cracked $100 million at the American box office, partly on the strength of the controversies it generated. There were lots of articles about whether it was too violent and too perverse and whether writer-director Quentin Tarantino had the right to use racial epithets. While glib and overlong, Pulp Fiction was, in many ways, an amazing movie, and like many amazing movies, it inspired other filmmakers to steal its least interesting qualities.
Across America and around the world, film students and ex-film students made playfully postmodern fables about motor-mouthed lowlifes and the ugly things they did to amuse themselves. One could detect fragments of Tarantino's DNA in films as diverse as Boogie Nights, Baise Moi, Fight Club and Narc. The grabbing of headlines-and mini-major distribution-seemed the whole point, and the film merely the means to an end.
Slick, nasty and quite pleased with itself, Irreversible continues in this tradition. The logline is Straw Dogs meets Memento-a series of scenes shot in unbroken Steadicam takes and arranged in reverse chronological order, showing a couple's violent disintegration at the hands of fate. In this film, "fate" means contrivance plus tabloid paranoia. The film's opening sees straight hero Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and his gay pal Pierre (Albert Dupontel) invading a gay S&M nightclub called The Rectum in search of a vicious homosexual pimp who raped his girl. Noe is a resourcefully brutal filmmaker who understands how to work you over.
The opening sequence is shot with a jittery handheld camera that's often placed in a nearly vertical position, and the whole nine-minute segment is lit mainly by a strobe. (Epileptics beware.) After the aforementioned vigilante attack, we see Marcus and Pierre prowling Paris in search of the rapist, and then we flash back to the rape itself, which occurs after the hero's girlfriend Alex (Monica Bellucci) argues with him at a party and leaves alone. As the homosexual pimp rapes her (anally, natch) he interrogates her with humiliating sexual questions. A few minutes into the rape, a stranger appears in the background, watches briefly, then leaves. The stranger's exit is a bully's hateful joke-the equivalent of offering an icepack to an assault victim, then tossing it away. Noe is the director as rapist; he lets you think he's winding down, then he has another go at you.
As the tale moves backward through time to a place where Marcus and Alex were happy and had no idea how bad things were about to get, Noe makes facile points about ignorance and bliss, and in his cynically manipulative way, he gives the battered, nauseous audience the happy ending it craves. (A brief shot of the poster for 2001 references Stanley Kubrick's ultimate trip movie and admits Noe's desire to rival it. But it's the wrong poster; his whole adult life, Noe has been trying to remake A Clockwork Orange.) The happy ending rings hollow on purpose; actions set in motion are irreversible, see?
In between set pieces, Noe whirls the camera slowly, in random spirals, while a phasing noise pulses on the soundtrack. The camera move seems to express the film's spiral-of-doom structure, but it's actually just a glorified flashback indicator-the Scorsese fan's equivalent of cottony clouds dissolving the picture. The film's adolescent excitement over the prospect of shocking us with sex and violence points toward a libertine attitude. But deep down, Irreversible is a deeply reactionary movie-one that longs for the days when gays and transgendered people were invisible, the streets of Paris weren't choked with minorities and women were content to please their man and squeeze out babies. Accidentally or on purpose, the movie's very structure reflects its pained desire to go back in time.
Speaking of going back: Just as grotesque as Alex's rape, but less remarked-upon by film critics, is Noe's nonstop stream of homophobic images and his feeble attempts to evade responsibility for deploying them. There's a hellish S&M club whose patrons beg for sex with a straight hero who finds them repulsive. There's a hateful homosexual pimp who will gladly butt-fuck a shapely straight woman if no male rectums are available, then crush her like a bug when he's done with her. I suppose we're supposed to find it ironic that the opening gay bashing is committed not by the brawny, hetero, overtly apelike Marcus, but his short gay buddy Pierre, who used to date Alex back when he was straight. (This part of the plot is like a Gregg Araki Death Wish.)
Sam Peckinpah was often accused of having a toxic imagination-remember the scene in Straw Dogs where Susan George got raped and liked it?-but at least Peckinpah had the courage to let the public see the connections between his ugliest images to his unfashionably straight, macho, conservative character. He didn't camouflage his caveman temperament behind unreal slurs. That's more than you can say for Noe, a cowardly poseur who thinks the ability to induce a visceral reaction among ticket buyers is proof of artistry. The best way to fix Noe's misperception would be to ask the filmmaker for ten dollars, then punch him in the mouth. Turnabout is fair play.