The poverty of Gasper Noe’s shock tactics.
The career If you view But it’s The tenor Across America Slick, nasty The opening As the tale In between Speaking Sam Peckinpah Irreversible
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.)
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.
Directed
by Gaspar Noe