Irreversible: Review By Querido

Irréversible is an exaggerated nihilistic vision on the depression within the cities. Noë drags the viewer into a gray world of hookers, drugs, shifty gay-bars and vigilantes, all brought to the screen on an extreme gloomy way. The film contains constant howling and the violence is so excessive, which causes that the movie feels forced and uncompromising. It is meant to be confronting on a realistic way, but it actually feels artistically.

Cinematographic wise, it begins awful. The first 15 minutes have been filmed with a tiny camera which hectic flows to all sides. Noë attempts to make the viewer get a feeling of disorientation, but all the excess of waving only caused that I could not even watch the function and all of it just looked in one word: 'art-fatsy'.

Ironically the quieter filmed scenes express more dynamics. The film contains a couple of phenomenal tracking shots, with as cream of the crop how Monica Belluci descends into the tunnel. Beautiful red color use and the scene is very threatening because it almost looks like she on her way to hell. Also the extremely heavy industrial soundtrack of Thomas Banglater really suits the hallucinatory character of the film and sound design wise the movie really sounds impressive.

The infamous rape scene I personally thought was perfectly done in the spirit of transparent emergency to show it as harsh as possible. Typical enough, that scene has been filmed in a continuos one shot of 9 minutes. A style of filming that was also used in the exploitation film, I Spit On Your Grave.

Vincent Cassel has been type-casted once again as the alpha male, but he is indeed made for those kind of roles. Belluci and Dupontel, on the other hand, perform both a piece of theatrical mimicry and strained acting performances. There is no interaction between them and the dialogs are mostly boring and pieced. With as peak the conversation about c*m shot.

Because of this, I thought that the reversed order of the film did not work at all, as the third act is just there on the basis of the characters to deepen the pseudo-philosophical-premise with unnecessary drivel about determinism. It is actually not a bad idea to play with the mood of the audience through the shocking climax before the quiet introduction, but that is also it. It just didn't work for me. But I thought it was very sad with that random stroboscope effect near at the end. Was Noe fearing that the film in itself would not give enough impact and making the viewer for a moment physically not well?