Irreversible

Movies
21

You two have me curious. Noe’s “I Stand Alone” is easily one of the most disturbing films I’ve ever seen. But also incredibly well-made.

Style (not plot) spoiler: I Stand Alone is famous for a moment, near the end, in which the screen goes black and a warning comes on the screen giving you 30 seconds to leave the theater. Then the seconds count down. It sounds silly but it’s pretty terrifying because the film up to that point has had a few incredibly violent scenes (including what is possibly the most emotionally and phyically violent scene I have ever seen in a movie), and it’s difficult not to get worked up wondering what could be so horrible that you’d need a warning.

I Stand Alone is basically a long internal monologue of an unemployed butcher as he wanders the streets of Paris. It’s dark and horrifying, but never to a point that doesn’t seem appropriate for Noe’s overall purpose, and if Irreversible is anything like I Stand Alone, I can understand any seeming contradictions in Tom’s description above. I Stand Alone possibly the most effective film about poverty and hopelessness I’ve ever seen. I think it was one of the best movies I saw last year, but I’m not sure I’d ever want to see it again.

But now I really want to see this one. Bastards.

22

That’s exactly my feelings on Irreversible. You should definitely try to see it in Toronto or whereever you can, since the opening scene actually directly ties into I Stand Alone (featuring the same actor) and answers a somewhat ambiguous question from that movie.

Stefan

23

Is this available on DVD? I missed it at the TIFF.

24

Is this available on DVD? I missed it at the TIFF.

It’s not on DVD, but Lion’s Gate picked it up for a limited theatrical release starting in March.

 -Tom
25

I just purchased I Stand Alone on DVD from Amazon. I look forward to watching it.

26

I was just looking for that on NetFlix. No dice. I’m not too sure about purchasing, but it sounds damn interesting.

27

I was just looking for that on NetFlix.

I’ve been keeping an eye out for it on NetFlix as well. I don’t know why they don’t carry certain movies, but I just sent a request for I Stand Alone. Click here for their title request form.

 -Tom
28

Thanks, Tom. I put a suggestion in for that title.

29

Not at all, and I have no idea whether it was easy or difficult to make (and could care less), but plenty of films are difficult or draining to make for the people involved. How does that lend it more meaning beyond what’s shown on screen? For all we know, George Lucas pours his entire soul into Star Wars and takes 2 years detoxing in Tibet to recharge his creative energies.

Unless you’re talking about skilled filmmaking, and there are plenty of dumb, good looking movies. Lots of technique over substance. If anything, it seems to me a movie that wants to present a serious discussion of issues like violence and revenge would be considerably more effective if you turned down the style, because style tend to overwhelm everything else and become the focus instead of the topic at hand. Compare Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer to, I don’t know, Hannibal. Which is ultimately more chilling?

You’re also implying a movie should try to be radical by presenting positive things.

Not at all, but it’s a lot easier for intellectuals to think a film is “radical” if you make it as downbeat and nihilistic as possible. It’s easier to destroy beauty than it is to celebrate it. If you do the former you’re generally considered a “serious” artiste. Doing the latter without making a Nora Ephron movie takes considerable skill. That’s why I think it’s more radical to make something amazing that celebrates beauty.

It’s a story with developed characters, reveals, and plot points. It’s a narrative construct built around the title “Irreversible”. It’s a trio of great performances from three established French actors (including the woman replacing Alia in the upcoming Matrix movies) and a controversial director. To reduce it to “a bunch of awful images” is a weak straw man argument.

Fair enough. What I’ve read about the movie makes it sound remarkably like an art house version of Death Wish. How is one exploitative and the other, er, artistic?

By the way, if you’re talking about the ridiculously sexy Monica Bellucci, she plays Persephone in the next two Matrix movies.

I also didn’t say Clockwork Orange and Requiem for a Dream were pointless or nihilistic. I said they were similar to Irreversible.

How so? I’m genuinely curious, because I’m familiar with the two most squirm-inducing scenes from Irreversible, and it seems to me that showing these events is gratuitous and exploitative since they only exist to show you that rape and violence are really bad things. Well duh.

Have you ever seen a movie called Pasolini’s Salo? Now that’s a brutal film, probably one of the most offensive major films ever, and its gratuitous sex and violence served his thematic purpose, which was essentially “Fascism is bad.” Well duh.

I’m just rarely convinced that showing things is better (or worse, as the case may be) than holding back. Showing things is more obvious, but when you have to figure out the awfulness on your own, it seems like it becomes even worse. (Though I agree 100% with the comments about the car crashes in Adaptation, which were probably the most jarring and realistic scenes of violence I’ve seen in a movie in years.)

Until Stefan pointed out the fairly obvious fact that it was in French, I had mistakenly thought Irreversible was a German film. I blame the director’s shaved head and his first name, Gaspar.

French, German… hey, if it’s Turkish or Iranian, it’d be even better!

The director is actually Argentinian, I believe.

30

Oh, I forgot this. Have you ever seen Straw Dogs?

31

But it’s not like you need to go to Sundance to see an incredibly difficult to watch look at violence on film. I’ve obviously not seen Irreversible, but I can’t imagine that its brutality is any more disturbing and realistic than the Sopranos episode this year where Tony and Ralphie have a drawn-out fight in the kitchen that ends with Ralphie’s head being smashed into the tile floor until his face is bloated and his skull is misshapen. The whole episode is extremely hard to sit through, both for the sudden violence and explicit depiction of someone being beaten to death, and the up-close look at the whole tedious process of cleaning up the scene and dismembering the body. You get to see Ralphie’s head and hands severed and placed in a bowling bag, but that’s not as horrifying as watching Tony taking a snack break by eating peanut butter out of a jar.

32

(Shhh, that’s not a foreign film. American films and shows are exploitative; with an accent, they’re artistic.)

And yeah, it’s not the violence so much that made that sense so terrible. It was the mundane “cutting up the body” part, and how matter-of-fact Tony and Christopher were about it.

33

There’s really no comparison – the Irreversible scenes are much, much worse. There actually is one scene from the Sopranos that I thought was far worse than the one you mentioned – the scene in Season 3 where Ralphie beats a stripper to death, which is made even more sickening because she’s such a sympathetic character in the script. I love the Sopranos for many reasons, including the show’s willingness to show explicit scenes of violence or sexuality, but the scenes in Irreversible are far beyond anything I’ve seen.

You could argue what’s the point in showing something so awful (other than ensuring commercial success in Japan), but I don’t think film (or any medium) should be obligated to avoid showing any aspect of human experience. It’s obviously not something that is enjoyable to watch for almost anyone (the same could probably be said about some of the violent scenes in Scorsese films, like Casino).

Also, to be clear, Irreversible is a masterfully made film, with great performances, that also happens to have explicit scenes of violence. The film isn’t made “artistic”, or “art house”, by their inclusion – it’s a choice that a lot of people will be offended by, no doubt about it, but I think it was necessary (and therefore not gratuitous), and really the point, of the film Roe wanted to make. Nobody is suggesting that’s a good thing (let alone that those choices made the movie great or artistic), or that anyone who doesn’t like this movie is an uncultured boor – we’re just stating that we were really affected by it, and thought it was an extremely well made (and we’re not talking in terms of production values) film.

There’s an interesting discussion of Irreversible at Jeffrey Wells’s column at Kevin Smith’s site: http://www.moviepoopshoot.com/elsewhere/index.html

34

I came in late. Calling a piece of media or art “successful” is dangerous business because it assumes the intent of its creator. That’s probably where we’re getting hung up on Tom’s statement. I know what he meant, though.

Sounds interesting. I would probably watch it. I can, when I’m in the right mood, seriously appreciate and even enjoy the experience of something that is interesting to an extreme, even if it’s not particularly “good.”

35

Really? I’ll have to see that to believe it. Not that I doubt you guys, but that Sopranos episode was really disquieting and personally, I can’t imagine that anything could take it farther. Especially the blase stuff before and after the murder, which I think made this episode a lot tougher to stomach than “University,” which featured the stripper death you mentioned. Though that one was also a great episode, for the way it showcased how women are disposable in Tony’s world.

36

One other thing…sympathetic character? Not really. The stripper didn’t deserve to have her brains bashed out against a metal highway divider, but she’s clearly shown as a piece of trash in her own right by that scene where Tony mentions how she’d got in trouble for burning her infant with cigarettes. And when she abandons her kid for days to hang out with Ralphie when she’s “sick.” She’s more pathetic than sympathetic.

37

Ralphie’s death, and the stripper, didn’t bother me half as much as when Melfi was raped.

38

They shouldn’t be obligated, but I find it hard to believe that anyone that’s ever experienced real violence would want to see it digitally recreated as realistically and brutally as possible on film in such an ultimately shallow film. I suppose there’s probably some context that makes it morally acceptable (like zombie movies), but I’m not sure what seeing a bunch of men masturbating while another breaks a guys arm, right before pounding him in the head with a fire extinguisher is part of human experience.

I suspect for the audience for this type of film, ast least in North America (intellectuals, upper classes), it’s some journey into the forbidden. Where does it stop? What exactly is taboo? If it’s shot well and is the point of, is graphic pedophilia acceptable, so long as its simulated and/or done with of-age actors? (I know, this is a dumb argument because it’s a different topic, but intellectually, how is it that different?)

I saw the movie via a perfect DVD rip I downloaded from e-donkey, and my French is extremely bad, so I didn’t pick up some of the dialogue, so perhaps I missed a lot of it. It’s beautifully shot, though I really dislike that kind of showy camera work because it draws so much attention to itself. Which is probably the point, since there was no substance to this movie at all. There’s barely any plot, and he cheapens the what would have been a beautiful ending by piling on a very Hollywood-style “oh, now it’s REALLY tragic” contrivance. (Pregnant women, children in peril, the old standbys.)

I can see how it would affect a person, and if anything, the structuring of it in reverse makes your experience leaving the theater considerably different than it had been had it been shown linearly. But I find it really hard to imagine anyone thinking it’s a particularly powerful story that would cause, as Tom says, a “purging of emotions.” Unless you’re talking about disgust. At least Salo, which is even more disgusting on many levels, has a higher purpose.

I realize that below you said it had excellent dialogue, and if that’s the case, then it’s entirely possible I missed a lot of the movie since, as I said, my French is terrible and my bootleg isn’t subtitled. But I still find it odd that the three major scenes are critical to the movie, if only in the sense that they’re gratuitous and extreme, and that’s normally a criticism leveled at every Hollywood movie with sex or violence. How is this film above that criticism? I joked about it being due to its foreign accent, but if it was “Jerry Bruckheimer presents, a Michael Bay film: Irreversible,” would the reaction be the same?

39

Ah, so you have seen it. Sort of. You mention that you missed the dialogue, which seems to me a pretty crucial part of a movie. But if you just watched a DVD rip on your desktop, you also probably missed out on the movie’s sound design. Very atmospheric disturbing stuff in a theatre.

There’s barely any plot, and he cheapens the what would have been a beautiful ending by piling on a very Hollywood-style “oh, now it’s REALLY tragic” contrivance.

Yeah, there’s barely any plot to Hamlet either. Dude can’t decide whether to kill his uncle. They should have put in dancing elephants.

FWIW, the narrative of Irreversible is less about the plot, which as you said is pretty simple, and more about the manner in which it unfolds. If you’re looking for some sort of Gabriel Garcia Marquez epic that unfolds over a few generations, you’re not watching the right movie.

But I find it really hard to imagine anyone thinking it’s a particularly powerful story that would cause, as Tom says, a “purging of emotions.”

Straw man argument. Among the many adjectives applied to the movie as a whole, the experience of watching Irreversible rather than just the story alone, is the word ‘powerful’.

Here’s a good question:

If it’s shot well and is the point of, is graphic pedophilia acceptable, so long as its simulated and/or done with of-age actors?

If part of your goal is to create disgust in your audience, go for it. Whether you can put that disgust in any meaningful context is another question entirely. Would Happiness have been a better movie if we’d seen Dylan Baker’s character raping the children? I don’t think so. It would have been a very different movie.

Would Irreversible have been better if the scenes you object to were cut out? I don’t think so. It would have been a very different movie.

All I can say is that I’m glad I saw the movie Gaspar Noe made rather than the one Guestacy wanted it to be.

-Tom
40

"I saw the movie via a perfect DVD rip I downloaded from e-donkey, and my French is extremely bad, so I didn’t pick up some of the dialogue, so perhaps I missed a lot of it. "

But I did chat up three women outside the theater after it to discuss it, so I guess that’s a good thing.