When you let people improvise, they decide the timing. And then we shot it six times. And you feel strong and you feel like a superhero, you run up the stairs and turn the camera. I had done such a muscular effort that the moment this spell of cocaine was over, the pain started and I could not even raise a glass of vodka.
Signup for our newsletter and make sure you never miss another story about your fandom fave. Art should empower those on the margins, not trivialize their trauma. And this is just one of the many reasons we believe that Irreversible is the worst movie of all time.
One of the biggest contentions viewers have with the movie is the violence. On its release, critics were split straight down the middle because of the gory depictions in the film, from a man being bludgeoned with a fire extinguisher, to a woman being raped for 10 minutes. By presenting vengeance before the acts that inspire it, we are forced to process the vengeance first, and therefore think more deeply about its implications.
We would hear it asked how a man could let his lover go out in public dressed like that: Does he like to watch as men grow interested? Then we would follow Alex as she walks alone into a subway tunnel, on a quick errand that turns tragic when she is accosted by Le Tenia Jo Prestia , a pimp who brutally and mercilessly rapes and beats her for what seems like an eternity, in a stationary-camera shot that goes on and on and never cuts away.
As I said, for most people, unwatchable. Now consider what happens if you reverse the chronology, so that the film begins with shots of the body being removed from the night club and tracks back through time to the warm and playful romance of the bedroom scenes. There are several ways in which this technique produces a fundamentally different film: 1.
The film doesn't build up to violence and sex as its payoff, as pornography would. It begins with its two violent scenes, showing us the very worst immediately and then tracking back into lives that are about to be forever altered. It creates a different kind of interest in those earlier scenes, which are foreshadowed for us but not for the characters.
When Alex and Marcus caress and talk, we realize what a slender thread all happiness depends on. To know the future would not be a blessing but a curse. Life would be unlivable without the innocence of our ignorance. Revenge precedes violation. The rapist is savagely punished before he commits his crime. At the same time, and this is significant, Marcus is the violent monster of the opening scenes, and the crime has not yet been seen; it is double ironic later that Marcus assaulted the wrong man.
The party scenes, and the revealing dress, are seen in hindsight as a risk that should not have been taken. Instead of making Alex look sexy and attractive, they make her look vulnerable and in danger. I think that Irreversible was not only a great film, it was horribly misunderstood. In fact, it might just be one of the most misunderstood films of all time. Why is the movie so misunderstood? He did such a good job of completely alienating the audiences with brutal scenes of rape and violence that a lot of what the movie was trying to say was lost in translation.
This reminds me of what happened when I saw Man Bites Dog. I have no doubt that something similar happened with Irreversible. So just by virtue of being art house, people who either love or hate this genre were bound to come to it with certain preconceived notions and biases, which is exactly what happened.
On one hand, you had the typical pretentious hipsters loving it for all the wrong reasons. On the other, you had art house detractors assuming that because it was art house, it was a sensationalist, exploitative piece of crap like Salo , just being shocking for the sake of shocking under pretense of saying something meaningful. However, there were so many fascinating themes it was trying to explore that I just felt compelled to clear the air of confusion that surrounds this film by explaining what those themes were and what the movie was trying to say about them.
A middle-aged and young man are on a bed talking about what they did to get in jail. Next we see two a swarm of police and an ambulance outside of a building. One man, Pierre, is being taken in by police and the other, Marcus, is being placed inside of an ambulance by paramedics. All the while, there are two men in the background screaming the most abusive, homophobic slurs you can ever imagine at them, ranting that they want their money, that Marcus and Pierre will be raped in prison and catch AIDs.
The camerawork spins, and we jump back in time a little bit. We see that the guy that was taken in by ambulance, Marcus, is on the warpath looking for a man named La Tenia inside of an underground BDSM gay club.
His friend, Pierre, is begging him to leave because the club, Rectum, is filled with dangerous thugs. Marcus ignores him and threatens a guy who he thinks is La Tenia. Then Pierre comes along and rescues him, but not without bludgeoning the thug to death with a fire extinguisher, to the point of caving in his skull.
As it turns out, La Tenia—the guy Marcus had been looking for—is in the background watching the entire scene unfold in front of him. The movie repeatedly keeps time jumping back to earlier parts of the evening, and we learn the reason why Marcus was looking for La Tenia is that his girlfriend, Alex, was brutally raped and beaten after leaving a party they were attending together. She left the party in a huff because Marcus, a substance abuser, did a few lines of cokes and was tweaked out of his mind.
Finally, we learn that her day had started reading a book at the park out on a gorgeous summer day. Okay, hold the phone. From the way I recapped the movie, it sounds as if there was nothing to Irreversible.
A lot of people felt that way, too, when they saw it. On the contrary, mes amis. There were lots of themes being explored in Irreversible , far more than you would think.
Reading reviews of Irreversible , I was shocked to see that people saw the movie as homophobic and a celebration of heterosexuality. The transsexual prostitute, Guillermo, who did nothing wrong the entire evening, was clearly a victim.
But if that was the case, why emphasize both so much? You could be a beautiful, popular, fun-loving straight girl who lives a life of middle class respectability. You could be a transsexual prostitute. You could be a gay man who lives a debauched life in the seedy underbelly of BDSM clubs being reviled by society.
Tragedy makes no distinction. Ditto, evil. The events that happened in Irreversible were all the results of one evil human being, La Tenia.
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