What if you really wanted to make the most disturbing, violent, grotesque, graphic, outrageous movie ever and show the debauchery of humanity to the extent where it is morally and aesthetically at the level of excrement? Gasper Noe, the director of irreversible probably had this train of thought when he made irreversible. He includes everything that is ugly about human behaviour that could legally be included, if he could include peadophilla and the prolonged graphic act of child rape or sex, he would, it certainly does figure in some of the dialogues.
Did he succeed? When film played at the Cannes Film Festival 250 VIP members walked out and 20 members needed to have oxygen administered to them because they fell unconscious. He certainly succeeded in repulsing his audience, but I’m sure he could have achieved the same by showing himself having a dump on the toilet.
Irreversible is probably the most explicit, perverse, violent and disgusting film ever made. It is extreme pornographic, is full of nudity, sex, violence and bad language and very explicitly shown that it makes the film Caligua look tame. It opens in a room where a fat man, wearing nothing but his underpants is sitting inside a room with another man having a conversation, while outside police and ambulances have arrived outside of a gay sado-masochism club called the ’’Rectum’’ with a man being taken out on a stretcher.
This is in fact the last event in the story, because the story is narrated backwards, hence the title ’’irreversible’’ Next: The camera has gone completely delirious, that it is difficult to make out what is going on and a blur of extremely graphic and repulsive gay sex acts taking place, where this man with murder(with his friend tagging along with him) on his mind and blood in his eyes is asking around for a man called ’’Tenia’’ as he asks around(an excuse for the director to bombard us with extreme gay sex) he comes across naked men in chains(dubbed faggots) begging him to ’’fist them’’ After this obscene search is over and he finds ’’Tenia’’ a fight breaks out and the man is beaten and Tenia then tries to rape him in front of everybody, at this point his friend jumps in to his aid and then in the most extreme violent act I’ve ever witnessed, smashes his face in with a fire extinguisher with such brutality that his face is flattened and just a pool of blood remains.
What follows in the rest of the film: She-male flashing their sexual organs; extreme racial abuse against a Chinese taxi driver; a 10 min explicit and brutal rape scene of a woman in an underpass, ending with the rape victims face being kicked in with extreme verbal abuse; a party with random acts of sex taking place and a lot of outrageous behaviour and drug use; a 10 min scene about boyfriend, girlfriend and her ex-lover explicitly discussing sex in the underground train; boyfriend and girlfriend lying naked on top of each other(the morning after) with some more sexual acts(but this scene is pleasant compared to everything else) and finally ending with flashing lights that could give you an epileptic seizure.
There is a definite structure to this film, as the film goes backwards, the camera activity and editing rhythms begin to slow down. It begins at it’s highest level of activity, where it very difficult to discern what is going on and then later calms down. The ending is actually quite powerful, if not pessimistic, where the woman(later to become the rape victim) takes a pregnancy test and learns she is pregnant, and we go back even further and now find her lying alone on the bed with her hand on her stomach and then shes lying down in a garden with a bunch of kids around her, ending with the message ’’time destroys everything’’
If you can actually sit through it, this is actually an artistic film, albeit dark art, but at the same time Gasper Noe cannot fool me that his movie is actual art, I know it was an excuse just to be pornographic and disgusting for the sake of it and that is why irreversible cannot be considered a work of art. It is a horrible mistake to have been made and the director needs to get mental help, especially for his issues against women and gay people. This is a film that would fit in perfectly with skinhead culture. A degenerative example of modern filmmaking.
Fortunately, I did not need medical attention because of watching this film, in fact surprisingly I was rather desensitized to everything. I think in todays world no acts of human depravity can shock you anymore.