The Real France: Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible

Cinemascope magazine
Summer 2002

Irreversible

In her post-Cannes coverage, Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly called Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible a “vacantly outrageous orgy of graphic rape, revenge, and gay bashing.” She led a near-unanimous chorus of critical spanking, the flock insisting that the only question to decide about the film was whether it was silly or just stupid.

Cut the guy some slack. Noé was a discovery of David Overbey, programmer for Toronto and the Cannes Critics’ Week. In 1991, Noé showed David his first film, Carne, in a grotty apartment in Paris’s Strasbourg-St. Denis area with heroin dealers and crack whores steps away. David was captivated by its 40 minutes of static visual beauty and bilious dialogue, spilling from the mouth of an Arab-hating butcher. It crackled with a prescient authenticity belied by Le Pen’s growing electoral success. At its Cannes premiere, Noé was hailed as a frightening but brilliant new voice in French cinema.

Soon after Overbey’s death, Noé returned to Cannes with 1998’s Seul contre tous (I Stand Alone), a film that used the same character and actor (Philippe Nahon), and amplified the same delusional, loathsome rants with a formidably intense visual style. Noé originally had wanted the English title of the film to be “France.” He believed that this awful man represented what France is all about; that underneath its dialectic of bourgeois smugness and sans-culottes jocularity, the nation seethes in obsessive loathing of the Other. Instead, the critics who praised it saw the film as a kind of companion piece to those TV movies about serial killers, but with more confrontational images.

So we come to Irréversible. Noé sets up the film with a short prologue by our old friend Nahon. Naked, fat, and snarling, he is an anti-Buddha who informs us that “Time destroys all things.” This clever joke anticipates the soon-to-come literal destruction of the film’s characters and their immediate rebirth.

The story is told backwards in time, forwards in narrative intent. A man (Vincent Cassel) rampages through a gay sex/torture club looking for the man who killed his girlfriend. The would-be-killer is colorfully beaten to death by the girl’s former lover, a philosophy professor. Next, Cassel beats up a Chinese taxi driver and tranny hooker looking for the club, while the professor asks him to be nicer. Cassel’s girlfriend (Monica Bellucci) leaves a party, walks into a dark underpass, gets brutally raped by a gay pimp, and is then beaten to a pulp. At the party, a high Cassel plays around with other girls, ultimately pissing off Bellucci. A subway ride to the party sees Cassel, Bellucci, and the philosopher discuss orgasms and how best to achieve them. Finally, the happy couple lolls in bed together, waking up, washing, kissing, and being romantic. The film ends with Bellucci discovering she is pregnant.

I give this long synopsis because most critics judge Irréversible as though it begins at the story’s temporal beginning and ends at the story’s temporal end. Noé’s decision to go backwards is seen as a cinematic trick, like his constantly swirling camera. (And what a camera it is—the early scenes, in particular, are astonishing in their relentless movement and their fascinating, fleeting parcels of information.)

By throwing our two male leads into the world of fisting faggots, chicks with dicks, and aggressive immigrant Chinamen, without any accompanying context for the viewer except a vague notion that they seek revenge, Noé posits them as French Everymen. What they see around them is what Mr. Frenchman believes is fucked-up about his society. When he shows a French superstar getting ass-raped by a gay pimp, while being denounced as a “rich bitch” in the same place dozens of hookers get slammed every year, he is setting up the same dialectic as Seul contre tous. The face of bourgeois culture is skin-deep, as is the precious sanctity of working-class dignity. Strip them both off and see real people, the real “France.”

(Some of Noé’s more outré critics consider the film homophobic because he paints the gay killer as a psycho animal, and the gay club as a site of animalistic behavior. What these—likely heterosexual—critics don’t get is that gay B&D sex clubs are site-specific: the whole point is to name and acknowledge a space to cater to animal needs. Noé understands that the over-the-top machismo of the club is the most logical place to have a macho showdown. Same for the club’s most desired participant, the woman’s killer. This is Gladiator, people. As such, Irréversible is a much more empowering film for gay people than some “funny” lisping faggot on prime time TV.)

Nevertheless, if the film ended with the rape, Irréversible would be a less interesting rethink of how central male violence is to male identity and how much this dynamic informs social politics. Instead, Noé challenges us to reconstitute a standard narrative by providing us with the missing piece. Were the film to actually start where it ends, you would be emotionally invested in this attractive bourgeois couple. Then you would follow their “descent into hell” with all the foreshadowing that such narratives demand. But we refuse to reconstitute this narrative. Why?

By putting the lovey-dovey stuff at the end, Noé identifies it as the actual problem. This ridiculous, idealized notion of heterosexual reproduction is a form of narrative deceit, and should be considered the object of horror; they are perpetuating all the bourgeois myths of safety and protection that Noé hates so much through the privileged act of making babies. He completes his earlier joke: time should destroy this.

This is not a very nice position. And I am not certain that Noé’s execution is clear enough to support his ideas. But the attempt is definitely not as silly, stupid, racist, homophobic, or vacant as the critics who seem to fear it so much.
—Noah Cowan