March 12 2003

GASPAR NOE and I disagree about what hell looks like. He sees a gay men's sex club called Rectum, a sea of guys shouting to be fisted and slapped, with chaps, beards, and the odd penis flopping up with the tide. I, on the other hand, picture hell as something more like a "dream" date with Matthew McConaughey. We both agree, however, that should a person arrive in hell, an audience of outsiders would likely be fascinated to hear the details of the voyage.

If you pack your picnic basket to ride along with Irréversible's road trip back from hell, you may want to pack a barf bag. So over-the-top are the strobe lighting, garish red walls, and meaty quality of the body butchery in the film's opening scenes, they almost call to mind the anti-prom night theme of a Michael Alig Blood Feast party. But Noé's party monster is the furthest thing from camp. Halfway through – after madman Marcus (Vincent Cassel) has unleashed his racist, hetero fury on a cab driver and some transsexual prostitutes but before he's attempted to kill a rapist – his friend and cohort (Pierre, played by Albert Dupontel) warns him against this "fucking B-movie revenge crap." Pierre clearly has no idea. This is a kind of movie revenge that hasn't visited your art-house screen before.

Turning away is a decent person's impulse that Noé thoroughly understands, and has consistently mocked. His previous shocker, I Stand Alone (1998), also featured a sort of human meat-grinding, along with incest, misogyny, gay-hating, and an intertitle warning, near the end of the film: "You have 30 seconds to leave the cinema." We didn't leave, and at this point we're culpable. In comparison to Irréversible, however, I Stand Alone's atrocities read like black comedy. With a camera recording a grueling rape scene from a fixed and awful position on the ground, a scene that a person can't help but flinch from and/or convulse to, Noé punishes viewers for their return visit.

The story – quickly summarized by a prologue, in which Noé's 1998 working-class antihero, the butchering bad guy (Philippe Nahon), pronounces that "time destroys all things" – is too easy to tell, and if told, too profound to immediately get. Which is why Noé went to such pains to obscure it (and stop reading here if you haven't seen the film yet) with reverse order, marking off each segment with shots from a camera so swirlingly unmoored it seems brain-damaged. What the audience sees, at first glance, is a man and his buddy on a bloody rampage. What they get to figure out is why. We learn – in half a dozen vertiginous scenes filmed in one uncut take each – that Marcus's fecund girlfriend Alex (Monica Bellucci, a.k.a. Malena) has been brutally, anally, raped and is in a coma. The impulse to judge – to size up each situation any one scene presents in terms of victims and perpetrators – is constantly undercut by the very next scene (in the "real" time of the story, the previous event), which explains the action that came before it. The remove actually required to judge is largely erased by Noé's personalizing techniques – for instance, when a camera shakes to the beat of a heart (mimicked in the soundtrack by a convincing drum sound) as Marcus is given the opportunity to take vengeance (which one instigator calls a "human right") into his own hands.

Unlike a go-nowhere exercise in puzzlement like Memento, Noé's film hooks bigger questions into the fabric, wondering about hate and happiness, repression and restraint. Noé can't help stalling the anal stage, equating club Rectum and all its accoutrements with underworldliness while positioning that other genital opening with goodness because it begets life. But Noé keeps his nihilism intact by rewarming that old chestnut, that love and hate are two sides of the same coin. He's come up with a unique solution to the "happy endings" audiences want: give them a happy beginning as an ending, one they realize has already been doomed.

The Rosebud about to bloom here is Alex, who, in a later scene of an earlier, tender moment, is glowing from her afternoon delight, unaware of the rape we already know will soon destroy her. Her two men – one an ex, professor Pierre, and one her current lover, Marcus – boldly discuss the nature of her orgasms on a public subway ride. Pierre, Woody Allen-style, is in a continuous state of tragicomic self-analysis over his inability to satisfy her and gibes at Marcus, calling him an "ape," apparently for his animal passion. But beneath Pierre's socialized veneer lies the greatest malignity of all. His final act, the first we see as viewers, is horrifying in a time when "shock and awe" just don't arouse the proper fear in the comfortable classes. Noé accosts that sheltered sensibility every way he can. You may be scratching your head over what, exactly, that question is, but by film's end, one thing is lucidly clear: love is – oddly – the answer.