Irreversible
Gaspar Noé

Dolan Cummings

Don't feel that you ought to see this film. It isn't therapeutic. It isn't 'important'. It won't challenge your preconceptions about sexual violence or provide you with some great moral insight. Nor should a film necessarily be or do any of these things.

Irreversible has terrific opening credits, and a beautiful closing sequence set to the slow movement from Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. In between come a charming portrait of a love affair, some unconvincing philosophising about the nature of time, and surely the most horrible rape scene in any film ever.

Does anybody really believe that the portrayal of rape in film incites men to rape in real life? Typically, in fact, a graphic rape scene serves to justify violence against the rapist later in a film. This 'B-movie revenge crap' is referred to in Irreversible, which frustrates the convention by reversing the action. So, first we see a man (not the rapist, as it happens) have his head pummelled away with a fire extinguisher, and only later do we see the rape that provoked it.

The rape isn't an ambiguous encounter. There is no trace of complicity. It is a brutal, unprovoked attack by a stranger on a woman walking home through an underpass at night. The scene is shown in real time, and takes nine minutes. It is so realistic as to defy realism. You have to remind yourself that these are actors, that there is a camera crew, lighting men, a director, all standing around. It isn't real. But of course the same can't be said for rape itself.

It's a feminist bromide that rape is not about sex, but power - as if that explains anything. This rapist has his own rationalisation. He harangues the 'rich bitch' for believing that the world owes her anything. He hates her for being beautiful and for living in a world that respects beauty. After raping her he smashes her face repeatedly into the ground to destroy her beauty, and with it, I suppose, the idea of civilisation. In response, we want to destroy him and his brutal, degenerate world. We feel sick knowing the wrong man gets his skull crushed.

But instead of indulging our desire for vengeance, we are forced to consider what it is that has been attacked. We go back and see Alex, the victim-to-be, with her childlike boyfriend Marcus and her more thoughtful ex Pierre. (We already know that while Marcus is filled with drug-fuelled rage, it is Pierre who will apply the fire extinguisher.) They are a likeable trio. They chat about openly on the Metro about sex (is that a French thing?), tease one another, and merrily talk rubbish.

Alex talks about the book she's been reading, and its theory about time. Everything is predetermined and unavoidable; all we can do is catch glimpses of the future in our dreams. What might otherwise seem a banal piece of whimsy is rendered horribly sinister by our knowledge of what is about to happen. But this, and other traces of the rape - Alex standing in a red-lit corridor, Marcus wrestling her and proposing anal sex - are not really sinister at all. The rape hasn't happened, and in the moment they are the stuff of life, of happiness.

For all that, Irreversible is an inescapably bleak film. At the very beginning (after all the action) the abusive butcher from Gaspar Noé's previous film I Stand Alone sits naked in a bedsit lamenting that 'Le temps détruit tout' (Time destroys everything). Of course, it was he who molested his own daughter, not time. And in Irreversible too, every act, including the rape and the revenge attack, is the consequence of a decision. But Noé doesn't care about decisions, except in as much as they constrain us. His perspective is inhuman. Time marches on, bringing beauty and horror as it pleases, and ultimately détruiting tout. All we can do is live in it.

UK release: 31 January

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