Gary Dretzka
Noah Forrest
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

March 14, 2003

Violence is in the air, and not just in the advertising pages of Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. Two weekends before the Oscars are presented, a few days before a war seems about to commence, Lions Gate Films widens its release of Gaspar Noe's Irreversible and Criterion offers a limited-time release of Sam Peckinpah's notorious 1971 Straw Dogs.

Back To The Future

Gaspar Noe's horrifying arthouse provocation, Irreversible, attempts both to shock and to haunt, leaving festival and preview audiences loving to hate or hating to love his essay on the purity of love as well as its profaning. The Argentine-born Frenchman's first feature, I Stand Alone (Seul Contre Tous) is a masterpiece of relentless corrosiveness, a French Taxi Driver, harsh and playful, steely and singular, a portrait of an angry, deeply disturbed man's interior monologue, or "radio of hate" as he once put it.

Blunt at the very least, Irreversible takes the form of a series of single-take widescreen sequences that move backward in time, beginning with end credits, followed quickly by a horrible "climax" that involves the brutal murder in a hellishly Stygian gay sex club called the Rectum of the wrong man sought in a frenzy of revenge. (Noe concedes that most of the scenes have "invisible" edits and other digital primping.)

But that's just for openers in this evil twin to Memento. The two men who are in a frenzy searching for a pimp called The Tapeworm are Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and Pierre (Albert Dupontel). The movie's visual style calms with each scene, leading to its centerpiece, its most notorious, a nine-minute, static shot in a flame-red pedestrian underpass in which Marcus' girlfriend, and Pierre's ex, Alex (Monica Bellucci) is raped by the pimp. The scene's almost unbearably graphic without becoming pornographic. It's an assault against our sensibilities, one I had to look away from, but it's hardly eroticized. (Creepier still is the figure that pops into the distant entrance a couple minutes in, watches for a moment, then darts away.)

A couple of scenes later, there's a bravura scene that, psychologically, is even more disturbing, as we discover the jealous dynamic that plays between Marcus and Pierre over the affections of Alex. In a scene almost as long as the genuinely appalling rape scene, the three banter in a Metro subway car on the to the party where all will go wrong, Noe is the complete director of actors and psychology, putting a scalpel to the pretensions of the "civilized" trio. Pierre is a sad brother to Dustin Hoffman's impotent intellectual in Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs. As LA Weekly's John Powers said of Irreversible, "If you've seen Straw Dogs, you're not surprised to find proto-fascist blood lust lurking inside an overintellectualizing Parisian limp-dick."

The scenes grow calmer still, leading toward a beginning of several touching scenes of fragile domestic intimacy and revealing a sweet secret Alex is carrying. Ranking up there with Your Friends and Neighbors as a great last-date movie, Irreversible prompts oppositions in your mind if you continue to watch. Blunt or simplistic? Pretentious or grandiosely ambitious? Noe ought to plead guilty to all of the above. For a contrary take, you could sample Jonathan Rosenbaum's one-star review, or Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw's dismissal from Cannes 2002. Kevin Maher's consideration of contemporary film violence, drawing Irreversible together with The Isle and Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day, is also worth a look.

Bellucci, who's married to Cassell, has been in arthouse hits like Malena and Brotherhood of the Wolf, and has vaulted to the big-budget leagues with Tears of the Sun, the two Matrix sequels and her role as Mary Magdalene in Mel Gibson's The Passion. For my conversation with the 34-year-old former model and law student, click here.

Remote Possibilities

Criterion's limited-time reissue of Sam Peckinpah's most controversial film, 1971's Straw Dogs, was released this week. Gaspar Noe has cited it as a key influence on his story of rape and revenge. In Straw Dogs, Dustin Hoffman plays David Sumner, a young American mathematician who moves with his English wife, Amy (Susan George) to a small Cornish village to experience a quiet and idyllic life together. He's a milquetoast, taking the insults to him and his wife in stride until she is attacked. Or has he wittingly egged on the locals? Is he the "heavy" in this movie made in the midst of the Vietnam War?

The double-disc set offers Peckinpah's original cut of the movie, about five minutes longer than released. It offers more of the footage that has caused commentators over the years to argue that the character is shown to enjoy the act; it's definitely a disturbing possibility in Peckinpah's unsentimental, violent view of the world. Brutal revenge follows: how much or how little does it take any of us to turn? Or how much cruelty do we carry within ourselves? There are glimpses of Peckinpah at work in several contemporary location previews. And long with a feature-length documentary, "Sam Peckinpah: Man of Iron," there's a terrific, context-placing essay in the program booklet by the poet Joshua Clover. "This approaches what a delicate soul might call 'problematic representation,'" he writes. "Yet to name the movie misogynist is to mistake the degree to which it is a movie that despises everyone. It is finally, the film's ability to drag the audience into its theater of cruelty, like dragging dirty foil across a rotten tooth, that marks something fearsome about art's capacities. It's astonishing and it's awful, and has provoked some of the most passionate disagreement on record." A couple of Peckinpah's exchanges with viewers are included, and he ends one terse note, "I didn't want you to enjoy the film. I wanted you to look very close into your own soul."

An interview with Peckinpah in the program booklet, however, is one of the worst features ever in a Criterion edition, drawn from a Quebecois paper, and translated back into English with a galling literalism that makes hash of Peckinpah's steely obstinacy.

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