A Review of Irreversible

You know that terrible French film that I mentioned? Here's a review of it. I think Vincent Cassel is growing on me. He's unexpectedly articulate and intelligent.

http://film.guardian.co.uk/interview/interviewpages/0,,886279,00.html

'It shows us the animal inside us'

With its horrifying scenes of rape and murder, the notorious French film Irréversible opens in Britain today. Its star, Vincent Cassel, tells Stuart Jeffries why he and his wife Monica Bellucci agreed to make it.

Friday January 31, 2003
The Guardian

Is it a good career move to star in a widely condemned movie that features a nine-minute rape sequence and a man getting his head bludgeoned to pulp with a fire extinguisher? Vincent Cassel rolls his eyes. "It's not a career move. But if you want to talk about careers, a lot of directors from all over the world will look up to this movie. This movie will be studied at film schools years from now."

Cassel, 36, one of France's leading film actors, is talking about Irréversible, the notorious picture that shocked Cannes, scandalised much of Catholic Europe and opens in Britain today - though only after censors mused long and hard about whether it could be released at all. In the movie, Cassel plays a vengeful husband trawling some of the most seamy Parisian clubs to find the man who raped his wife, Alex, and to kill him. Alex is played by Cassel's real-life wife, Italian model-turned-actor Monica Bellucci.

Much of the critical interest in this difficult film, directed by Argentinian film-maker Gaspar Noe, has focused on how it tells its rape-revenge story in reverse. The picture starts with the attack and leads back to the rape and a seduction scene in the shower between Cassel and Bellucci, whose putative sexiness is undone by the violence of what we have seen in the rest of the film. "Actually, our friends found the shower scene the hardest to watch, because it seemed the most intrusive," says Cassel.

This device of reversing the chronology of a story in film is not new. In the 1983 film adaptation of Harold Pinter's play Betrayal - which deals with a woman's affair with her husband's best friend - the entire story is told from the husband's point of view, with the scenes in reverse chronological order. "One of Gaspar's original ideas in fact was to buy up the rights to remake Betrayal," says Cassel, who is also one of Irréversible's co-producers. "But we couldn't, so Gaspar wrote this. The idea of telling a story in reverse destabilises your ordinary moral reactions. That's one of the points of art - to challenge your preconceptions."

In the film, Alex rows with her boyfriend at a party and leaves alone. Instead of crossing a busy street, she walks through a grim-looking subway, wearing a see-through dress and high heels. She is attacked by a gay pimp, who calls her a "fucking bitch" and anally rapes her at knifepoint. We then see Alex try to get to her feet before he grabs her and thumps her head repeatedly into a slab until she passes out.

What did Cassel think when he saw the scene? He squirms in his seat. "I wanted to be on the set as a moral help. But Monica said she didn't want me to be there. She said there was no reason to be there, and that it would be harder for the actor to work if I was. So I went to the southwest of France to surf.

"When I saw the scene I laughed - as a defence I guess. It is a very difficult scene. We have both been confronted by our best friends who have asked us, 'Why did you do it?' It's amazing to be able to surprise your best friends.

"My brother stood up in the middle of a screening at the Cannes film festival last year and shouted: 'Gaspar Noe - son of a bitch! We're going to get you!' And he's a rapper. He's supposed to be hard core."

Bellucci, 34, has said that she did not find it hard to perform in the rape scene, which was filmed in one shot from a fixed camera. She said that afterwards she sat down, had a cup of coffee and thought about something else. Her appearance in Irréversible clearly has done her career no harm - she recently finished playing Persephone in the two sequels to the Hollywood blockbuster The Matrix. She has also played Mary Magdalene in Mel Gibson's looming Christ film The Passion.

Cassel, already the star of such great French movies as La Haine and L'Appartement as well as Gallic blockbusters such as Brotherhood of the Wolf and Crimson Rivers, has also hardly been starved for work since Irréversible. He is to star alongside Bellucci and Eddie Izzard in what he calls "a shamanic western" directed by Jan Kounen, who made the violent Dobermann in 1997, also starring Cassel. He is also to star in Gilles Mimouni's first film since the well-received 1996 picture L'Appartement, and in a new picture to be made by his friend Mathieu Kassovitz. None of them, he says, will be as controversial as Irréversible.

Cassel says that Noe initially approached both him and Bellucci to make the film that "Tom and Nicole screwed up. He meant Eyes Wide Shut. At first he said his fantasy would be to make a film with explicit sex that makes you cry.

"We thought about it, and he showed us lots of films with explicit sex in them like Intimacy, l'Histoire d'O, and In the Realm of the Senses. And finally it was getting very complicated and we said no. Then he came up with the idea for Irréversible. There was no script, just 15 pages - pretty much as many pages as there are shots in the movie. I thought it was great. I really respect him and when someone makes a movie like this it is provocative and it is art. I like that it makes people react."

And people have. At Cannes, furious French critics lambasted Bellucci, Noe and Cassel. One asked, why not show a real rape? It's a question that still angers Cassel. "Why not? Well, because this is a movie and we are making cinema. It's about faking something. It's not a snuff movie. I don't mind people reacting to the movie at all, but some of these people didn't consider the movie as made by artists but just as wankers trying to provoke. We're not wankers."

Perhaps not, but what is the moral justification for such a film? Some have said that showing rape at all on film is wrong. There are lots of films that have done so, notably Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs. That film only recently received a certificate, 18 years after it was made. Its most controversial aspect is the rape of Susan George, which she is shown to be enjoying, momentarily. And in Death Wish, Michael Winner's near contemporaneous film, Charles Bronson plays an architect who reacts to the murder of his wife and attack on his daughter by going on a killing spree, the moral being that it is reassuring for public morals for Bronson to impose his gun law.

Irréversible subverts the violent-revenge ethics of Peckinpah and Winner. As viewers we are at least uncertain that Cassel's character's attempt to wreak revenge on the attacker is right, rather as we were when we saw John Wayne's character mutate horribly into the husk of a human being as he seeks revenge for the abduction of his niece by Comanches in John Ford's The Searchers. From this perspective, Irréversible might be seen as a moral movie.

For Cassel, though, the issue is not that clear. "It is a moral movie, but it's also a nihilistic one. It shows us the animal in us. The main problem for the audience is that they don't want to see the animal that's in all of us. Gaspar's film forces us to see that animal." And for Cassel, the animal is male. "It's a pro-female movie," he says. "The purest thing in the movie is the woman. Men fight, they're ugly. The men are stupid, and selfish, and she's like the crushed flower."

What's the point of showing a rape that lasts nine minutes? "When you see violence in movies in general, it's very quick and painless, which isn't what it's like. This is what it's like."

The British Board of Film Classification decided to release Irréversible uncut on the grounds that, though the film may well be shocking and unpleasant for many viewers, its content was unlikely to promote harmful activity. But the board has intimated that it may take a different view when certifying the film for video release. Cassel rolls his eyes again. "If it's a question of cutting the film for video, we would have to withdraw it. It's not a movie you can cut. It's not Tomb Raider. It's a work of art."

· Irréversible is reviewed by Peter Bradshaw in Friday Review