Irreversible: Straight Cut | Review
Monica Bellucci and Jo Prestia in Irreversible
Anti-Climax: Noé Reconstructs the Scene of the Crime in New Edit of Controversial Classic
By Nicholas Bell | Published on February 9, 2023
Gaspar Noé gets back to where he started with Irreversible: Straight Cut, a newly edited version of his 2002 provocation Irreversible, the shock treatment sophomore film, which brought him international acclaim and an infamy he’s honed unapologetically in the twenty years since its conception. Celebrated and reviled for the nine-minute anal rape and brutal beating sequence of Monica Bellucci by a gay man in a Parisian under passage, Noé’s original narrative was edited in reverse chronological order, a play on a title, which suggests there’s, ironically, no going back. Deciding to recut the film in proper linear sequence, one might argue, whether backwards or forwards, the end result remains the same. However, even when familiar with the brutality of the film’s initial presentation, our preconditioned sensitivity to more traditionally assembled cues does tend to allow for a grueling crescendo of intensity. Instead of being dropped, deliriously, into situations of extreme depraved violence with characters we’ve not yet come to recognize, the traditional presentation allows for our mind to adjust to the horror of the situation instead of compartmentalizing the disembodied traumas. Arguably, neither edit is a pleasant viewing experience, but removed from the wake of Christopher Nolan’s critically acclaimed Memento, which influenced Noé’s sophomore film, we’re arguably better able to appreciate his penchant for supreme hedonism and blanching viciousness, elements which he’s only further honed into more epic nightmares, such as the grueling but underrated Enter the Void (2009) or the pulsating and unhinged Climax (2018).
Alex (Bellucci), a distinctly beautiful woman, attends a house party with her boyfriend, Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and her ex, Pierre (Albert Dupontel). Marcus is a bit nonplussed by the straight-laced Pierre, who holds an obvious flame for Alex. As Marcus gets obnoxiously inebriated, the two men bicker, and Alex, who recently learned she’s pregnant, leaves the party alone. But while walking through a pedestrian under passage, she’s violently raped and assaulted at random by a pimp known as Le Tenia (Jo Prestia). Marcus and Pierre leave the party just in time to see Alex’s mangled body being lifted into an ambulance. Some neighborhood heavies suggest they can help find the perpetrator more easily than the police, offering the men a chance at swift retribution.
If, arguably, the fates of Alex, Marcus, and Pierre are correspondingly doomed whether told backwards or forwards, there’s a remarkably interesting difference in how we perceive their trauma chronologically. Noé’s original version feels like a disorienting blow to the psyche, challenging our need to empathize with someone, somehow, despite nauseating transphobic and homophobic behaviors, particularly on the part of Cassel’s Marcus, like the id to Alex’s ego and Pierre’s superego. Sadly, beyond the victimized Alex and a coterie of sex workers (the only group portrayed willing to protect one another), there’s no one whose actions inspire our communion. Philippe Nahon, who headlined Noé’s cruel debut I Stand Alone (1998), opens the original, musing about how “time destroys all things,” a reflection which loses none of its impact when appearing in the final frame. But in the Straight Cut, Noé’s subtexts feel more apparent, at least as far as clueing us in on intention. Alex lounges on a picnic blanket casually reading J.W. Dunne’s 1927 manifesto An Experiment With Time, outlining his theories on pre-cognitivism and serialism, complex hypotheses on the illusive realities of “time,” whereby sleep may be the only potential liberation from its destructive rigidity. Indeed, Alex and Marcus converse about their dreams, which proves to be prescient. Prior to their ordeal, she dreams of a garish subterranean tunnel while he loses feeling in his arm, both elements which would come to fruition. Their shared apartment is lined with Stanley Kubrick and Marvel comic posters, and Noé tends to frame his three leads in some sort of cylindrical apparatus, passageways to a destination. Whether it’s the under passage where Alex meets her demise, their apartment hallway, or an extended sequence on the subway, they are enclosed while being transported elsewhere. Alex’s pregnancy highlights a normal trajectory of such a passageway, the vaginal penetration of procreative sex, while the original narrative plays more forcefully with elements of the unnatural, such as the gay club named The Rectum (i.e., ‘the wrong hole’ in strictly heteronormative culture), where a man nicknamed “the tapeworm,” suggests opportunistic degradation for the parasitical (or, the unnatural, inviting chaos, destruction).
Real-life couple Bellucci and Cassel, who worked together several times, including in 1996’s The Apartment (remade in the US as Wicker Park, 2004) and 2001's Brotherhood of the Wolf, have the boisterous frivolity of young twenty somethings, which explains why Alex thinks it's a good idea to force her former lover, who’s still infatuated with her, to commiserate with her new beau, somewhat of a primitive loose cannon in comparison. The entire scenario is a fiasco waiting to happen, while Noé explores his fascination with disembodied figures in either some sort of demimonde or the tragic banality of life itself, as seen in his recent, sobering Vortex (2021). Whatever the case, in whatever sequence it unfolds, Irreversible leaves a lasting impression, a template for the kind of grueling, torture-porn subgenres eventually normalized in the preceding decades. Twenty years later, in the ever quickening climate of catastrophe and degradation, is there a point in revisiting the shock value of Irreversible? Or, is it merely a flinty footnote to remind us of Poe's timeless sentiment, "Is all that we see or seem/but a dream within a dream?"
★★★1/2☆☆