Irreversible (2002)

5 STARS

“Irréversible”

General Information:

All information below is taken from the following link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0290673/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

18        97 min                          –  Crime  | Drama  | Mystery                 –              31 January 2003(UK)

Director

Gaspar Noé

Writer

Gaspar Noé

Stars

Monica Bellucci;  Vincent Cassel;  Albert Dupontel

Plot:

Irreversible (2002)

Events of one night unfold in reverse-chronological order, opening with events after a tragic rape, and then progressing backwards and backwards before the brutal act occurred.

Review:

I felt physically sick whilst watching Irreversible. But I mean this as the highest compliment possible. It is my belief that if you dislike this film because it is sick then you are entirely missing the point. Rape and violence on screen should hurt the viewer, if not, the filmmaker is in a somewhat ‘dodgy’ moral-position.  I confess, I felt a vile churning feeling in my stomach throughout and at some points, I closed my eyes; furthermore, I felt that horrific feeling of actually wanting to be physically sick, but being unable to. This is the most extreme reaction I’ve ever had to a film.

The ‘unwatchability-factor’ of the film is highly connected to its blunt, if not obvious message: rape and violence are barbaric acts and fate is inescapable.

The film is infamous for an 8-minute rape scene, where the camera stays icily still and forces the viewer to watch. It is often the case that rape or violence is portrayed in film via cheap gimmicks, no doubt used due to the ludicrousness of censorship-culture: the camera turns away and you hear a scream. Well, I’m sorry, but in real life, that’s not what happens when someone is brutally assaulted. The victim experiences the entire barbaric act, and it is morally-right that the act isn’t cheapened or made to be less horrific. Gaspar Noe understands this and thus makes the viewer witness the entire thing, thereby showing what rape really is. This pleases me because there seems to be a lot of ‘rape culture’ infesting its way through our world: people discussing the act as if it’s a joke or a game. Show such people Irreversible, they won’t be laughing anymore. I don’t wish to degrade the act of rape to something less barbaric or fun, but the only way I can describe the scene simply is that it is “the cinematic equivalent of being sexually assaulted”. That is genuinely how I felt. It is one of the most brutal and powerful scenes I have frankly, ever seen in any film. The scene almost (heavy stress on almost)  makes the viewer feel like the victim, Alex (Monica Bellucci), that they see on screen, as the scene is: unforgiving, uncompromising, brutal, and it feels longer than it actually is, and you will (horrifically) always remember it.

It is of course a shame that this is all the film is famous for. The film isn’t strictly about rape, or even violence for that matter. (This is 8 minutes in  a film that lasts for 97 minutes.) The film is about the inevitability of fate. The narrative of the film goes backwards. Thus, the point being, that we ironically know what is going to happen to Alex before she does. As the film draws to a close, it ends on her beginning the day, we now know everything that will happen to her, whilst she is blissfully unaware. The infamous 8-minute scene plays halfway through the film. Following this are thirty minutes of laughter, contentedness (and perhaps even, tranquility). It is endless shots of Alex, her boyfriend and her friends smiling, drinking and having fun. Personally, I found these scenes more disturbing than the rape itself – what is more disturbing: the concept of rape, or not knowing in the future that you will be sexually-assaulted, and that it is an inevitable event in your life’s own timeline? Those brutal 8-minutes or more will always happen to Alex and she will never be able to escape them, they are a fixed point in time. Thus, the film transcends cheap exploitation into a film about predetermination and a very bleak form of existentialism. Think of it as a very brutal Art-film.

When everything was happy…

Stylistically, the film is fantastic. Gaspar Noe is the most inventive director around when it comes to sound-design and cinematography. His camera spins and glides in a dizzying fashion through each scene, quite literally spinning endlessly around characters. You feel physically repulsed by the cinematography as the constant spinning builds up a sense of giddying, dizzying, vomit-inducing dread. The sound design is a consistent drone which adds to the visuals, but furthermore, it contains a specific-note which when played constantly apparently taps into a part of your psyche which produces that feeling of being physically sick. The film understands that depth and style must be combined together to make a truth. The concept of fate is thus interlinked with the feeling of sickness and revulsion, to make the audience contemplate the negative concepts and ideas that eschew from fate and predetermination.

This is a provocative film which is at once very intense psychologically and very intense intellectually due to the philosophical notions that it puts forwards. It deserves to be commended in the highest regards.

The spinning, lurching camera-movements in Irreversible

Atmospheric visual-flair of Irreversible

Conclusion:

Perhaps one of the most disturbing films I’ve ever seen. But also one of the most profound. Indeed, the depth adds to the disturb as it makes the terrifying sequences and concepts of the film stay with you. Irreversible is truly cinematic. Indeed, this is the kind of film which going to the cinema is all about.

Baise-Moi (2000)

0.5 STARS

“Rape Me”

General Information:

All information below is taken from the following link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0249380/

18       77 min                          –  Crime  | Drama  | Thriller                 –              3 May 2002(UK)

Director

Coralie;  Virginie Despentes

Writer

Coralie;  Virginie Despentes

Stars

Raffaëla Anderson;  Karen Lancaume;  Céline Beugnot

Plot:

Baise-Moi (2000)

A rape victim and a prostitute ‘rebel against society’ by going on a pointless rampage of violence and sex.

Review:

Baise-Moi really is just a pointless waste of images and any decent human being’s attention. It’s a film which wants to be shocking and outrageous but never actually is. After viewing it, I IMDBd it – only to discover that this movie actually has ‘fans’. I place the word: fans, in-between apostrophes there because I believe these are the sort of people who are tricking themselves into believing that the film actually has some depth, simply by over-intellectualising all of the events that they see – the sort of person that believes that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a Marxist critique on Nazi Germany (i.e. the chainsaw-wielding ‘Leatherface’ being Hitler himself, and all of his cannibal family being members of the SS, and no doubt intentionally searching for a shot where the coincidental placings of decaying flesh and/or bones forms the shape of swastika).

And anyone who claims that this film is remotely ‘feminist’ is directly insulting Emily Davison.

The film’s setting is in the seedy underbelly of France. A place where drugs, sex, violence and rape are in every corner. Imagine Hobo With a Shotgun without the winking-at-the-camera self-awareness or the irony. The film unfolds in a very serious way, as if it has something interesting to say, and that all of the comic moments are actually satire – this can only be proven by its rather confrontational title when translated into English (‘Rape Me’). It’s like a Gaspar Noe film, without any of the style, visual flair or depth.

The film pretty much opens with a rape scene. The scene itself is rather effective. It’s shot with a manic hand-held camera – which captures the chaotic and brutal nature of the event itself without being so shaky that you can’t see what’s going on. There’s a horrific moment where one of the characters lies on the floor, defenseless, pretty much waiting to be raped, whilst she hears the sounds of desperation and agony from her friend who is being raped. It’s a powerful moment, and perhaps the best sequence in the film, because it injects an emotional reaction from the viewer during a scene of violence. I’ve awarded the half-star purely for this scene. I think the fact that I responded to this scene is pure luck on the filmmakers’ part: a cinematic fluke, if you will. When the scene ended, I didn’t feel that sense of ‘relief’ which you usually feel after a tense scene in a film. In fact, I wasn’t left shaken. The rape scene itself reminded me heavily of one of those comedians who just tell cheap cliché jokes which aim to offend, and where all the punch-lines are pretty much similar. You  briefly chuckle; the laugh is never remembered, and the gag never quoted.

How to recover from a harrowing experience such as brutal gang-rape – courtesy of Baise-Moi.

Following this, the two girls then go on a hedonistic rampage. The film then nudges towards us endless sex scenes and murder scenes. I use the word ‘nudges’ there because the film has literally no conviction with its content and subject matter at all. For violence or sex to be shocking or to stimulate any emotional response from the viewer, it has to be violently thrown towards our eyeballs with some form of visual flair or cinematic style. I am reminded of Kevin Smith’s directional style in Clerks. He presses the ‘record button’ and simply lets the actors ‘get on with it’. The same here. The record button is pressed and we are shown a recording of some sex and violence. Sex and violence on its own isn’t particularly shocking, it’s the ideas that lay behind them. I think the ‘point’ of the film is that the two girls go on this rampage for no reason whatsoever. The killings are random. If this is the case, then the notion of murders occurring without any motif is an unnerving one – but the film never takes advantage, thinking that by simply showing us bullets causing blood-wounds and penises going inside vaginas is simply enough. “A true thought, badly expressed, is a lie.”

The film is part of a new movement in cinema known as ‘New French Extremity’. One of the key auteurs, as I’ve already mentioned, in this movement, is Gaspar Noe – a man who in Enter the Void showed us a sex scene from inside of the vagina itself. No, I’m not joking. Now, you may find this disgusting or shocking or blunt or whatever – but this is exactly the point. This movement is a call-back to the 70s exploitation flicks and ‘video-nasties’. People would queue up to see these films which shocked, aroused and perversely entertained. These films were exhilarating and thrilling. The problem with Baise-Moi is that it is anything but. (And this isn’t necessarily because it doesn’t present us with a rather ‘original’ love-making scene).

Seedy, psychedelic head-trip. Gaspar Noe’s ‘Enter the Void’.

But this isn’t the case with the film – it’s all images and nothing else. Thus due to this, the film is beyond bland.

I think my reaction to the film was quite simply this:

Oh look, there’s a woman sucking a man’s penis. Oh look, he’s sucking her vagina. Oh look, they’ve gone into a bar and massacred everyone there. Oh look, they’re consuming drugs. Oh look, his penis is going inside of her. Oh look, he’s just orgasmed. Oh look, she’s just orgasmed. Oh look, they’re all dead. Oh look, he’s screaming in agony. Oh look, there’s more dead people. Oh look, she’s screaming in agony. Oh look, she just said a naughty word. Oh look, an orgy. Oh look, he just said a naughty word. Oh look, another orgy. Oh look, another penis going inside a vagina. Oh look…

To which my reaction to all of this was quite simply: “So what?”

Verdict:

Not shocking. Not exciting. Not entertaining. Not thrilling. Not horrifying. A trashy piece of nonsense which takes away any emotional reaction to the scenes that it’s in. So bland and dull that the names of the characters escape me, and I couldn’t even remember which one was ‘the rape-victim’ and which one was ‘the prostitute’.

Horror Fest: DAY 9

Sorry for the late posting of this!

Frontiers (2007):

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0814685/?ref_=sr_1

Plot:

It is election-time and riots are on the streets due to the fact that a potential fascist government may gain power. A group of protestors are shot down and head for a place to stay, they then come across a motel owned by a family of neo-nazis.

Review:

Frontiers (2007)

Sometimes there are films I watch which I can objectively say are masterpieces, but sometimes for no apparent reason, I do not emotionally react to them. It may be because I’m not in the right mood, or in this case because I have been watching horror films endlessly non-stop. I can objectively say that if somebody else saw this and if they were in the right frame of mind, they would be left disturbed and utterly horrified. Cinematography adds to the terrifying atmosphere due to its bleak colours. Direction is pitch-perfect. Tension is at the max. Acting is utterly realistic.

Frontiers is a brutal political horror film of such raw extreme power that it forces you to mutter the words: why? Why did the Nazis commit such human atrocities? Was all of the bloody killings in the past, and seen in this film worth it for some ‘pure’ Aryan race? No, it wasn’t and will never be. The film says this ‘no it isn’t’ statement with an incomprehensible confident assurance. What makes Frontiers so excellent is that it is unashamedly brutal and unsubtle – it is part of a current filmic movement called ‘New French Extremity’ – a sub-genre/movement of ‘extreme cinema’. Leaders in this movement include Gaspar Noe and taboo subjects and explicit violence are used to shape an emotional reaction and to challenge the viewer on difficult subjects. Other films in this genre are Martyrs, and this genre is directly influenced by horror and exploitation cinema, and political-horror such as Salo: 120 Days of Sodom.

Frontiers criticises neo-nazis ideologies and basic principles with such excruciating bluntness that by calling the film exploitation would come across as an insult. The violence is extreme, gory and messy. But the violence never feels exploitative, cheap or camp because it is presented in such an honest manner, it feels real – this is partially due to the flawless acting and use of handheld camera techniques. If anything, the realism makes it more intense.

I think I really have to stress how brutal the film is. There are scenes where people are tied up, beaten. A scene where a man is put into a small claustrophobic tank, and hot gas is injected in – a very obvious metaphor for the innocent people gassed to death in Auschwitz and other concentration camps. A scene where a girl has to crawl through mud to get underneath bars to try to escape. A scene where a young girl who has been stolen from her family cuts a brunette woman’s hair, in preparation for her to be a new man’s wife, because he does not like dirty brown hair. Characters are stripped of their humanity, and the final shots are of the survivor character crying and screaming as he/she escape in a car. This final character is as memorable and up there as Sally in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

I have only mentioned brief moments of this film to give you an idea of what it is like, I do not want to spoil it for you, so I have described it in as much detail as possible without giving too much away.

This is a movie which perhaps towards the end didn’t emotionally affect me because I have been desensitised over the last days. To say that this has annoyed me would be an  understatement. But it did at least make me think. I consider this to be a sheer masterpiece of horror, and calling it horror almost feels degrading towards it. I think the only term is: art. Gruesome, honest, brutal art. This film isn’t just terrifying, it’s terrifyingly confrontational.

Verdict: 4/5