Irreversible - 2002

 The year?  Likely 2002 maybe 2003.  I had just started working at my first real job, the independent theater Rialto Cinemas Lakeside.  We get a poster for Irreversible show up in the lobby one day.  We never get the movie, or maybe we get it for like a week when I'm not there.  Either way, the poster catches my eye and I'm interested enough to rent it on DVD when it does eventually show up in my local video store, Bae's.

I had the poster on my wall for years.

Renting Irreversible, I didn't know a lot about it.  I try not to watch movie trailers these days, I don't google movies as they're coming out, I'm not on social media, so its easy to avoid opinions and spoilers of things, but still there is not the sense of going in as blind now as there was then when you truly did not know if anyone else ever knew the thing existed.  

I was raped as a kid.  It's the source of a lot of my oddity I guess, and its the reason for my searching the depths of depraved cinema: as a way to confront my trauma and as a way to understand the universality of suffering, and expression of suffering through artwork. This movie is pointedly shoving your nose into the shit that is the awful underneath part of humanity, the violence and the depravity and the wanton destruction which we all know about, some of us experience, and even with this, we still don't really talk about or know how to confront.

The filmmaking in this is next level.  From a 3-4 page script and with a bare minimum of sets, actors, experience, etc, director Gaspar Noe takes us on a largely impulsive frenetic, and backwards, story of a rape revenge.  We follow about 14 long sequences, beginning and then ending, and the next sequence picking up before the last one and ending where the last one began.  We thus see Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and his friend Pierre searching for The Tenia, a rapist who raped and beat Marcus's girlfriend (Monica Bellucci).  

There is intense violence and sex in this, including a static 9 minute rape scenes which truly divides audiences.  Every character in this movie is scummy, a evil bastard who is not much better than the disturbing world presented, and yet with the extreme violence and rape near the beginning of the film and how we keep tracking back and back before that what do we see?  We see the beauty, we see the foreshadowing, we see the regularity.  

There is a lot in this film about trauma, about being in the wrong place at the wrong time and about circumstance and happenstance.  There is a lot about the evil in humanity, the fucked up weirdness that is relationships and people's inner selves.  Tagged as misogynistic, homophobic, amateurish, brutal, style over substance and more. Noe continued on to make many amazing films which I'd recommend all of.  And I would truly recommend this movie, which still hits 23 years later.  5 stars.