Irréversible () is a 2002 French art thriller film written, directed, and edited by Gaspar Noé, who also served as co-cinematographer with Benoît Debie. It depicts the events of one night in Paris as two men (Vincent Cassel and Albert Dupontel) attempt to avenge the brutal rape and beating of the woman they love (Monica Bellucci).
The film is made up of a title sequence followed by 14 segments made to look like long takes, each of which is either a continuous shot or a series of shots digitally composited to resemble a continuous shot. The story is told in reverse order.
Theatrically released in France, the United Kingdom and the United States, Irréversible competed for the Palme d'Or at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival where around 200 people walked out of the screening. It won the Bronze Horse at the Stockholm International Film Festival. Critical reception was polarised, with praise towards the performances and Noé's direction, but criticism towards its graphic portrayal of violence and rape. American film critic Roger Ebert called Irréversible "a movie so violent and cruel that most people will find it unwatchable".
A recut version of the film putting the narration in chronological order, Irreversible: Straight Cut (), was screened in 2019 at the 76th annual Venice International Film Festival. This was later released in US theatres on a limited run in 2023.
Plot
Alex and Marcus, a young couple, wake up together and discuss their relationship, as well as an upcoming party, while in the nude. Marcus voices concern about Alex's ex, Pierre, also being invited because he "stole his girl", to which Alex responds that he did not steal anything, because she is not an object and it was all her decision. Alex reveals she had a dream of herself standing in a red tunnel that breaks in two. The two talk about a potential pregnancy and Marcus expresses hope in one before Alex takes a pregnancy test, the result of which is never shown, but she seems particularly pleased with.
On a public train, Pierre, Alex's ex who is also invited to the party, constantly bickers with Alex over his inability to satisfy her during their relationship, while Marcus shows no interest in their squabble. Alex explains to Pierre that he always focused too much on her, and a sexual partner can feel and is aroused by their partner's pleasure. At the party, Marcus gets drunk and takes cocaine, much to Alex's disapproval. She leaves the party, asking Pierre to look after Marcus. Alex descends into a red pedestrian underpass on her way back to the train when she notices a transgender prostitute getting attacked by a man. He immediately turns his attention to Alex, anally raping her before savagely beating her into unconsciousness.
After Marcus and Pierre discover Alex being taken away by paramedics, they encounter street criminals Mourad and Layde, who offer to help them find the culprit. They use an ID left at the scene by the prostitute to locate her. Marcus verbally assaults Concha, the prostitute, and threatens to cut her face open in order to gather that the rapist's name is Le Ténia ("the tapeworm") and that he frequents a gay BDSM club called Rectum. The men are chased off by other prostitutes; Marcus and Pierre jump into a taxi cab and speed off into the night. When the cab driver doesn't know where Rectum is, Marcus attacks the driver, stealing his vehicle. The two end up finding the club's location, with Pierre reluctantly following behind Marcus. Leading the charge, Marcus proceeds to get into a fight with a man he suspects of being Le Ténia, who overpowers him and breaks his arm before attempting to rape him. Pierre comes to his rescue and beats the man to death with a nearby fire extinguisher as the man's companion, the actual rapist, watches in amusement. Marcus is carried out of Rectum on a stretcher while Pierre is arrested by police as Mourad and Layde deride them.
Meanwhile, in a nearby small apartment, a man named the Butcher tells a friend that he was arrested for raping his daughter before dismissing the commotion going on outside.
Cast
Director Gaspar Noé has a cameo as one of the Rectum patrons.
Production
Development and pre-production Irréversible was originally titled Danger. Gaspar Noé first found financing for the new title after he pitched the story to be told in reverse, in order to capitalize on the popularity of Christopher Nolan's film Memento (2000). He has also attributed his ability to get funding to the celebrity status of lead actors Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel (who were married at the time). Noé has cited several films as influences for Irréversible including Betrayal (1983), for its reverse chronology, In the Realm of the Senses (1976), I Am Cuba (1964), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Straw Dogs (1971), Deliverance (1972), and Death Wish (1974). The film was produced in part by StudioCanal.
Noé says he had met Bellucci and Cassel at parties and that "they were so madly in love at that time that they were almost asking people..., 'Do you have an idea for us to play in a movie together?'" He originally asked them to be a part of the film project that would later become Love, but they didn't want to do the explicit sex scenes. Cassel said, "We thought about it, and he showed us lots of films with explicit sex in them like Intimacy, l'Histoire d'O, and In the Realm of the Senses. And finally it was getting very complicated and we said no." Noé then pivoted and suggested a "rape-revenge movie backward," and they agreed. Cassel ended up as a co-producer on the film and stated that, originally, Noé wanted to purchase the rights to remake the 1983 film Betrayal, but couldn't.
The film was conceived in reverse chronological order but shot in chronological order in the summer of 2001. The script only had three pages with each of the twelve scenes taking up about one-quarter of a page. None of the scenes had written dialogue. They only had six weeks to film because Bellucci had to start production on The Matrix Reloaded in September 2001.
Filming Irréversible was shot using a widescreen lightweight Minima Super16 mm camera and was later blown up to 35 mm with most of the camerawork done by Noé himself. The film consists of about a dozen apparently unbroken shots melded together from hundreds of shots. This included the infamous nine-minute-long rape scene, portrayed in a single, unbroken shot.
Noé said he had no idea how long the rape scene was going to last, as this was determined by Monica Bellucci, who essentially directed the scene, and Jo Prestia, a professional French boxer, who played her assailant. When asked directly why it had to be so long, Noé responded, "That is simply as long as it might last in real life. Sometimes you hear stories of someone being raped for half an hour. It seemed the normal timing for the situation." The rape scene was shot six times over two days, each take being one shot from a fixed camera. There was no intimacy coordinator involved given this profession didn't yet exist. Bellucci reportedly watched the films I Spit on Your Grave and Deliverance before shooting. Vincent Cassel said he wanted to be present during the shooting of the rape scene as moral support, but Bellucci didn't want him there. According to Cassel, "She said there was no reason to be there, and that it would be harder for the actor to work if I was. So I went to the southwest of France to surf." Bellucci has expressed no issues with filming the rape scene. She has said that after shooting, she would sit down, have a cup of coffee, and think about something else. It was shot in a real Paris underpass, known to be frequented by prostitutes, which has since been destroyed. The dress worn by Monica Bellucci throughout the film was made by Yves Saint Laurent and was modeled after a green silk dress that Bellucci owned. They made ten copies of the dress since it was destroyed during every take of the rape scene.
The fire extinguisher scene was inspired by a VHS documentary Noé had bought in England called Executions, which supposedly showed real footage of the different methods of capital punishment. According to Noé, one scene showed a man screaming with half his head missing. He said, "I couldn’t believe that someone with half his brains out wasn’t dead or that it would take so long to die. I was really shocked by that image....So for Irreversible I gave that tape to my visual effects guy, and said, 'how could we do this?'"
Many of the actors in the film were nonprofessionals. For example, according to Noé, the "two guys who say, 'revenge is a human right.' Those were the guys doing security for my movie. It’s funny, you start talking with people and they find their own words, their own ideas." Much of the acting throughout the film is improvised, but notably two scenes were thoroughly rehearsed: the kicking of Bellucci's character's head in the rape scene and the murder scene with the fire extinguisher. Noé said that he would show footage of the rape scene to Cassel and Dupontel before shooting the revenge scenes to help them "get crazy."
There were apparently multiple endings of the film: one more explicative and one more emotional. The emotional ending is the one that ended up being chosen.
Noé stated in interviews that during the production of the film he used cocaine in order to help him carry the large cameras needed to capture the rotating shots in the film. He also said the only difficult scene to film was the party scene, which took twenty takes.
Noé has said his decision to include the Butcher, the protagonist from I Stand Alone, in the beginning of Irréversible was inspired by Stanley Kubrick. Noé said, "I read a book about Kubrick, and it said that he liked to use something from one film in the beginning of another. I liked the idea of that, as if there was a commercial in between, and then you pick up where you left off." There is also a nod to Kubrick in the posters seen in the apartment of the characters played by Bellucci and Cassel. Hanging above Bellucci's character's bed is a rare 2001: A Space Odyssey poster, and on the dresser is a half-sheet from Kubrick's 1956 film The Killing.
Post-production Computer-generated imagery was used in post-production for the penis in the rape scene. It was also used in the scene where Pierre beats a man's face and crushes his skull with a fire extinguisher to augment the results, as initial footage using a conventional latex dummy proved unconvincing.
The soundtrack was created by Thomas Bangalter (of Daft Punk). During the first thirty minutes, in the club scene, the music is designed to sound as if there were two different tracks playing at two different levels to imitate real clubs. Then, an extremely low-frequency sound of 27 Hz (a sound which police use to stop riots) was added to create a state of nausea and anxiety in the audience. The sound is not immediately perceptible to the spectator but is powerful enough to evoke a physical response. Noé said, "You can't hear them, but they make you shiver. In a good cinema with a good audio system, the sound can scare you much more than what's happening on the screen." This technique, called Sensurround, involves the intentional use of a sub-audible sound to enhance the spectator's experience of a movie, in this case, deliberately making them uncomfortable (although this would only be experienced in a cinema setting as most home speakers would not emit such low frequencies).
Release
The film premiered in France on 22 May 2002 through Mars Distribution. Persons under the age of 16 were prohibited from attending. It competed at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival. It was released in the United Kingdom on 31 January 2003 through Metro Tartan Distribution, and the United States on 7 March 2003 through Lions Gate Films. It grossed $792,200 from theatrical screenings.