To the Rectum, and Back Again

Gaspar Noé's steely-eyed 1998 feature I Stand Alone was like a French Taxi Driver — only 22 years bleaker. It took us deep inside the mind of an enraged racist butcher who beat pregnant women, longed to sleep with his autistic daughter and (rather like some columnist for The American Spectator) described France as a "shithole of cheese and Nazi-lovers." The movie divided not only audiences but individuals. When it premiered at Cannes, I asked an English critic his opinion. "I hate it," he said. "It's a masterpiece."

The same polarized response has greeted his wantonly assaultive new film, Irreversible, an art-house rape-and-revenge flick that unfolds in reverse like a demonic version of Memento. But this time, far more viewers have been stomping out of festival theaters — at Cannes, at Edinburgh, at Sundance. That's no surprise, for Noé is a punk provocateur who loves rubbing your nose in dung. Here he serves up gratuitously explicit footage of a fire extinguisher smashing a man's head like a melon, followed by an already infamous anal-rape scene that runs nearly 10 minutes. Caveat emptor.

Irreversible roars into horror-show high gear with Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and Pierre (Albert Dupontel) bursting into a gay sex club, the Rectum, that's like the worst acid trip John Ashcroft could ever imagine, a teeming beehive of sanguinary light, leering blowjobs and guys fucking other guys against walls. Someone gets murdered, and then, almost before we've registered what's going on, Marcus and Pierre are suddenly shown on their way to the Rectum, and we gradually grasp that the story's being told in reverse. Things keep moving back in time until the pivotal sequence in which Alex (Monica Bellucci) walks into a pedestrian underpass wearing a dress so clingingly wispy — a suggestion of perky nipples has actually been sewn into the silken fabric — that you immediately wonder whether Noé is saying that she's begging to be raped. Which, of course, is precisely what happens, in graphic, though not pornographic, detail. (There's nothing remotely sexy about it.) Alex's savage violation casts a shadow over everything that "preceded" it — we now understand the motive behind the opening murder — and everything that follows, as the film moves backward through a rowdy party sequence, a jolly métroride and some tender, post-coital moments back in Alex's apartment. Gliding ever more swiftly into a hopeful past, we see, as the characters cannot, the fragility of their happiness.

The opening 50 minutes are brutal, but if you can take the punishment, you'll probably be wowed by Noé's skills as a filmmaker. Each scene in Irreversible was done in a single shot of roughly 10 minutes, and they've been welded together seamlessly: It feels as if we're watching time unspool backward. Noé is a full-service auteur — he wrote, directed, shot and edited the film — and formally Irreversible is a tour de force, from its stunning wide-screen compositions to its ever-modulating camera style, which begins in a hallucinatory frenzy at the Rectum and gradually grows calm, even pensive, as the story moves Alex, Marcus and Pierre back toward the night's peaceful beginnings.

Although Noé is notorious for ratcheting things up until you want to jump out of your skin (if he made slasher films, they'd induce heart attacks), Irreversible's most interesting scenes may well be the "normal" ones, which capture the slippery sexual dynamic of Alex, her lover Marcus and her shifty ex-boyfriend Pierre; there is, for example, a hilarious bit on the subway when the overbrainy Pierre is horrified to learn that Alex has orgasms with Marcus, though she rarely if ever did with him. A superb director of actors, Noé wins Bellucci's most natural performance in years, helps Dupontel evoke Pierre's worm-in-the-apple slyness, and pushes Cassel to a rich, versatile performance that plays like backward Method acting: As the movie progresses, he gets quieter and more internal, moving from rampaging fury to touching tenderness.