dir. Gaspar Noé

Opens Fri March 14 at the Varsity.

So here it is, the big French rape movie. The film that created a chorus of vomiting at Cannes and Sundance washes ashore on a tide of controversy that only the French are brazen (stupide?) enough to dabble in these days--and like 2000's Baise-Moi, Gaspar Noé's Irreversible aims to shock. Unlike Baise-Moi, however, Noé's opus can safely be called art--though whether it is art you want to partake of is up for debate.

The story: Monica Bellucci plays Alex, a stunning middle-class Parisian who, along with her boyfriend Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and her ex-boyfriend Pierre (Albert Dupontel), sets out one night to attend a party. At the party, an argument breaks out, and Alex leaves in a huff. On her way home, she is raped (anally, no less) and horrendously beaten in a pedestrian underpass by a thick-nosed deviant known as "Le Tenia." Upon discovering the crime, Marcus and Pierre employ local hoods to track the rapist down at a gay club called Rectum; the two then beat him (or possibly the wrong man) to death with a fire extinguisher. And they say French cinema is no longer vital.

Structuring Irreversible in reverse order, Noé begins with the killing of Le Tenia and works backwards, eventually arriving at the day's afternoon, when Alex, lounging in a vast green park, reads a book surrounded by playing children. Thanks to this sort of gimmickry, relief washes over you after Alex is violated because you know the worst the film has to offer is over, and every scene shown after the rape--but really taking place before--feels drenched with foreboding.

That there is no actual omen, however (other than a pseudocautionary dream Alex has), is Noé's real trick, and it's a rather sadistic trick at that: The message of Irreversible is supposedly that certain events can never be undone, though I suspect one of the film's promotional taglines--"Because Time Destroys Everything"--is closer to the truth, and as such Noé's film is undoubtedly one of the bleakest ever burned to celluloid... so bleak and brutal that it is nearly impossible to recommend. Both the murder, which is done in one long, terrible shot as the accused's face is pounded into hamburger, and Alex's rape--also done in a single shot, as we hear a horrendous, guttural whine from Alex--are so shockingly violent that the predominant feeling you may get from watching this film is one of regret.