A film too sick for Cannes - The Globe and Mail 11.08.

2022 16:22

A film too sick for Cannes

RAY CONLOGUE
PUBLISHED MARCH 14, 2003

This article was published more than 19 years ago. Some information may no longer be current.

There are so many shocking things on movie screens these days that the viewer's hide
is thicker than an armadillo's. Everyday action flicks feature heavy-booted violence,
body probes and grotesque scenes of drug addiction.

What would it take, these days, to send people actually stumbling, sickened, out of a
movie theatre?

Gaspar NoŽ knows. His Irreversible,which opens in Ontario this week, arrives here
with the peculiar distinction that 250 people fled from the theatre when it was
screened at Cannes last summer. That's because very early in the action a man beats
another man's head to a bloody pulp with a fire extinguisher. This is done in real time,
so that nothing is left out.

At about midpoint in the same movie, there is a real-time rape that lasts for nine
minutes, at the end of which the woman's head has been smashed into a tiled floor
until she is in a coma.

And this is an art film.

NoŽ is a 39-year-old Paris-based filmmaker who, along with people like Claire Denis (
Trouble Every Day)and Virginie Despentes ( Baise-moi),has brought extreme violence
into the world of serious French film. In Despentes's film, two women go on a man-
killing spree not to take revenge on men but simply because they think it's fun, for

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example, to put a bullet up a man's rectum. In Denis's Trouble Every Day,a woman
tries out cannibalism, chewing her victim's face and licking the bleeding flaps of skin
on his cheeks.

All of these films seem to exist in a moral vacuum, as simple expressions of the
degradation inherent in human nature. That's not a new theme for art films, but in the
past serious artists have been careful how they portrayed it. Nobody wanted to be
lumped in with the grossness and excess of commercial film.

Three years ago, when French films like Romance and One Against All (also by NoŽ)
were already pushing the limits of violence, U.S. film critic David Thomson suggested
that "we've reached a point where there is excessive pressure to show us what we
haven't seen before, with or without -- but increasingly, without -- dramatic or
narrative support" that would justify it.

Some critics advance Irreversible as Exhibit A for the prosecution. Here is a film with
the thinnest possible story. Pierre gets drunk at a party and his girlfriend Alex decides
to go home without him. En route she is brutally raped. Pierre and his friend Marcus,
emerging from the party, see her being lifted into an ambulance and get a tip that the
assailant is in a gay club called The Rectum. Mad for revenge, they invade the club,
have trouble finding the rapist, and finish up by crushing an innocent man's skull
while the club's denizens look on with avid curiosity.

NoŽ has also been condemned for inducing viewer nausea with technical devices,
including a 27-hertz rumble such as police sometimes use for crowd control (it works
directly to disorient the nervous system) and rotating the camera so that scenes take
place horizontally rather than vertically.

NoŽ himself, reached at his home in Paris, denies the charges categorically. Rather
than upping the violence quotient of current film in a degrading race to the bottom,
NoŽ asserts that he has re-introduced true violence into a cinema that has largely
eliminated it.

"Back in the seventies, you had realistic violence in U.S. films," recalls the Argentine-

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born filmmaker, who spent part of his adolescence in the United States. One of his
favourite early films was Sam Peckinpah's famously bloody Straw Dogs. "I'd also name
films like Texas Chainsaw Massacre,and Midnight Cowboy,which got an Oscar. But
nowadays," he continues, "video chains like Blockbuster demand family-oriented
films. A moral majority is winning power in North America. Whatever is done with sex
or drugs that's close to the real experience goes straight into counterculture
distribution, where it's marginalized."

He rejects David Thomson's idea that there is increasing pressure to show gratuitous,
decontextualized violence. "On the contrary, when portrayed in a commercial film
that costs a lot of money, there's great pressure to make the violence not look real at
all."

By way of defending himself, he makes an argument that Catherine Breillat has also
made in defence of an anal rape scene in her film Fat Girl:that women support this
kind of imagery because it depicts the horror of what they actually experience. It is,
they claim, a remedy for the falsely glamorized picture of rape in Hollywood cinema,
which suggests women are ambivalent about sexual aggression.

"Women like this movie much more than men do," he says. "It doesn't market
violence, it is about the violence of men toward men and women in general. It's about
the politics of sex." He adds that the actors and actresses in the film "cut their salaries
because they wanted to do this movie." Alex, who undergoes the rape, is played by
Monica Belluci.

Irreversible is told in reverse time, beginning with the murder in the club and moving
backward to the rape that caused it. But, as NoŽ points out, that is only half of the
movie. The second half continues to move back in time, and becomes quite sunny. We
see Alex dreaming of having children and her affectionate relationship with Pierre.
They both feel bad about Marcus, her former boyfriend, and try to keep his friendship
(that's why the three went out together that evening). "The second half is positive, it's
about reproducing the species and going on with life," he says. "And you know, people
who walk out of Irreversible think about it, and they often come back a second time
and see the whole movie."

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He submits that Europe is a less violent place than the United States, but that violence
is growing throughout Western countries even as our culture hides it and replaces it
with the childish pretend-violence of the computer game.

"It's true that violence on film is overwhelming. But I had a nightmare the first time I
read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. My movie is no more real than that novel."

Critics have also accused him of clothing an exploitation film in bogus art-house
intellectualizing. Guardian critic Kevin Maher in particular mocked NoŽ's statement
that the film is about how "time reveals everything. It only exists within us, and we
through it." Isn't that lovely, wrote Maher, adding that Oliver Stone should have used a
French accent and promoted Natural Born Killers as a "non-time-specific" work of art.

NoŽ actually finds that funny. But he adds that for all that English critics "like talking
about shocking scenes, in the end the British passed the film uncut."

He is also delighted that Miramax has asked for 50 prints of the film for U.S.
distribution, quite a lot for a French film. "Maybe they're counting on Monica Belluci
to sell it. She's also in the Bruce Willis war movie that just opened. Maybe they think
that will draw people to my movie."

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