Review: Irreversible

Pretentious fucking cunt, stop fucking with the letters!

What a shitty movie.

The plot is that a slutty libertine leaves her meek, pathetic husband for an idiotic douchebag, gets raped, then the douchebag and the ex-husband (who are somehow friends) go looking for the rapist, can't find him, and instead beat some random guy to death.

As you can see, it's a boring, pointless plot. Nobody would watch it if that was all, I imagine Gaspar Noé recognized that as well and added some gimmicks.

First, the movie is extremely tasteless in that way that is oh so appealing to eager teenage boys and immature persons desperate to show how mature, cool and edgy they are.

When is this stupid idea that provocation equals art going to die off already? Look, you show a man getting his face beat to a pulp¹ with a fire extinguisher. You show a woman subjected to anal rape². There's disgusting penises randomly dangling everywhere³. There's blatant racism⁴ and homophobia. You're not provoking me. You're not moving me. I'm just annoyed because I'm subjected to this crap and there's no point to it. It's tiresome. After having invested an hour and a half of my time into this asshole's movie, contributing to his popularity and profits, all I get in return is contempt, and I (I think rightfully) feel cheated.

The second gimmick is that it's told in reverse. Whoop dee fucking doo. It contributes nothing to the film (except that I have to keep switching back and forth to figure out who is who and what's going on) and it's not interesting. If this was at least the first movie to do it, I could understand, but it's made 2 years after fucking Memento. "Tell the story backwards" was the mainstreamest fucking thing ever by then. Of course, it's just another layer of pretentious stylistic bullshit slathered over a pointless core.

Gimmick #3 is the fucking retarded camera work: Half the time the lights are strobing on and off and the camera is veering all over the place. I don't just mean the "edgy" shaky-cam like in Battlestar Galactica (I actually didn't even hate that) - at some points the camera literally turns upside-down and does 360 around the room (while the action is going on in the corner and you can't see). The scenes are all dirty and dark and you can't see shit. I had to turn my monitor's brightness up just to be able to tell what's going on!

I imagine some fart-sniffers think this is totally awesome and artistic and what not. Well I think it's shit. Using a shaky cam to indicate disorientation doesn't work when A) the camera is shaky all the fucking time and B) the character doesn't even act disoriented at all while the camera is spinning. If I had to guess, I'd say the camera is so obnoxious simply to continue the trend of contempt for the audience disguised as art⁵.

There's no point to Irréversible. The only good thing about is that Monica Belluci has nude scenes. The story is boring and clichéd. The delivery antagonizes the viewer. The characters are all despicable. Gaspar Noé is a hack. Why did I even watch this? Enter the Void was a piece of horseshit.

Score: 1/5



¹: Much of it looked quite fake to me. Even though I'm a big wimp about these things I couldn't help laughing at how terrible it was.
²: It doesn't even make any sense. The guy is a pimp arguing with his prostitute, then he sees some woman and just randomly decides to... rape her. In the middle of a wealthy area in Paris. Does he somehow figure he won't get caught? Does he not care? He certainly doesn't have much urgency about his movements. In fact, someone does see them, and then runs away. Why doesn't he call the police? I guess life is just shit and Irréversible is edgy and uncomprising like that.
³: A real rogue's gallery: Grimy patrons of a gay bar, a transsexual prostitute flashing her dirty hairy crotch, the forementioned rapist's tool after he's finished. If you're going to show porn, at least show some that isn't disgusting!
⁴: While looking for the rapist's favorite gay bar (no, I don't know why a gay man is raping a woman either) the douchebag, Marcus, becomes enraged because the taxi driver doesn't know where this particular bar (called RECTUM, because gay bars must always be the epitome of seedy and repulsive, probably because gays are subhuman filth) is, and asks Marcus whether he's gay (as I said, gays are scum so being so much as suspected of buggery is obviously the ultimate insult). The taxi driver happens to be Asian, and the douchebag hurls racist epithets at him. They then assault him and take his taxi. There's no consequence to this scene. It could be taken out and it wouldn't make a difference. But what I don't get is, why does the taxi driver have to be Chinese, and why must Marcus insult specifically his race? Can't he call him an old fuck, an idiot, an incompetent taxi driver, anything? If this was real life, I wouldn't put much malice behind the coincidence, but this is a planned out movie, so there's no coincidences. Gaspar Noé was writing the script, and he must have actually thought "You know what, I'll make this guy Chinese, that way I can have this character call him a slit-eye and it'll be that much more edgy!" at some point.
⁵: I think the way this works is, Gaspar Noé makes a movie that is as deliberately annoying and insulting to the audience as possible, and then pretends that it's all just part of the "art". Then, gullible idiots lap it up, because they want to prove to everyone how they are so refined, and they like such terrible movies that only a true film enthusiast could like because good films are an acquired taste.