Michelle Scavone

I’ve never been one to turn off a movie halfway through because it disturbed me so much that I couldn’t continue…that was, until I saw Irreversible, a French film by Gaspar Noé made in 2002. ‘It’s going to be violent,’ warned my boyfriend. ‘Meh,’ I responded.

Presented in reverse chronological order, the film commences depicting two men, Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and Pierre (Albert Dupontel), in a desparate search for le Tania, a man whom they believed anally raped Marcus’ girlfriend Alex (Monica Bellucci). We see the men trawling through a gay club, the Rectum, asking everyone if they know le Tania (meaning ‘the tapeworm’). Graphic gay sex acts are performed in the background, understated. The dialogue is continuously coarse, i.e. ’it smells like shit in here’.

When they finally confront the man who they believe is le Tania, the man breaks Marcus’ arm and proceeds to rape him, but not before Pierre crushes the man’s skull with a fire extinguisher - gruesome, but I continued watching.

Following on, we cross to a scene of Alex crossing an underpass (remembering that the film is in reverse chronological order) and pass by a man and woman who are arguing. The man starts hitting the woman and Alex starts to help. The man then turns his attention to Alex and what follows is a highly disturbing, 9 minute rape scene - at which point I had to turn the film off.

I’ve since learned that the scene was shot in one go, from a still camera, so as not to ‘eroticise’ the act. There is apparently a shot of the rapist’s genitals after he has finished his crime but I didn’t make it to that point.

The scene upset me because it transformed from a violent movie to something real. I thought about how the horrible act I was watching on screen actually happened in real life, every day, every hour probably. So that’s a kudos to Noé, I suppose.

But I have been thinking about it ever since. Wondering what Noé’s intentions were. To shock? To create art ‘for art’s sake’? To create a violence so raw that it hurts the viewer to watch? Why would he even want to do such a thing? To prove his merit as a director, to break boundaries and to create controversy I suppose.  And what was he thinking of when he actually filmed the scene - did he just become completely desensitized to what he was doing to the point where it was just another scene he was filming, just another day at work?

I googled some reviews and found the following answers, briefly:

• Noé is critiquing the gay scene and by presenting it in such a brutal violent way he is inadvertendly producing a homophobic piece of work
• Noé’s cinematography celebrates Bellucci’s beauty, figure-hugging dress, and by doing so he could be inherently saying that beautiful women can’t go untouched in our world
• The film argues against rape and advocates revenge

More so than Noe’s intentions, I wondered about the reactions of viewers. In my googling I read that this was the ‘most walked-out film of the year’ - well, that’s not surprising. Who could sit through that scene without quivering? I wouldn’t want to know.

At university I studied a subject called ‘Art/Pornography/Blasphemy/Propaganda’ which looked at controversial works of art and debated their artistic merit. I generally tended to support artistic merit in favour of blasphemy or pornography when I discussed a work of art - artistic freedom is something that is continuously developing as society becomes more tolerant and open about portraying sex and violence. If an artist doesn’t have freedom, he can’t be an artist. Art is very natural, personal and highly contextual. And for these reasons, I try not to get offended by art, porn, sexually suggestive advertising - whatever. The only time I really get offended by something is if there is not a general artistic intent - like hard porn, which merely exploits girls who are drug addicts.

So, I wouldn’t say that the film offended me. I don’t hate it. But it did disturb me, and it upset me. Apparently, according to Noé,  I am a ‘bourgeoise pussy’ because I turned it off. I think I will return to it one day because I am curious. For now, I’ll just be left contemplating the merits of artistic intent.