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Irrevérsible
and the Limitations of Abject Cleverness
Following
a road through death, cruelty and nasty sex in a vehicle rented
from The Classical Philosophy and Theology Company, Tony
McKibbin takes Gaspar Noé's controversial new film
Irrevérsible
as
a starting point for an examination of recent French 'extreme
cinema'.
[Extract]
In Gaspar Noé's debut feature, Seul Contre Tous,
at the beginning of the film the central character waves a
gun around insisting this is morality. By the end of the film
Noé's managed to show that morality doesn't lie in
the gun that knee-jerk morality that suggests an eye
for an eye and the survival of the fittest - but more in what
a gun can do. Near the end of the film, with the butcher's
daughter apparently dead and the butcher about to take his
own life, the whole question of gun law is given an interesting
physiological morality - do we want to see this man who has
beaten his mistress to an almost certain miscarriage, and
abused his daughter, do we nevertheless want to see him dead?
What Noé offered was a film that seemed to say no we
don't - no matter how despicable we find the actions, there
is a body and mind about to be destroyed. Do we want to see
that mind and body destroyed after empathically following
it for an hour and a half?
What's missing from Noé's new film, Irréversible,
is this physiological morality, no matter if there's an equal
emphasis here on what we might call Noé's impact aesthetics.
In this story of a young guy (Vincent Cassel) intent on avenging
his partner's (Monica Bellucci) rape, Noé's interested
in the visceral impact but has eschewed the physiological
even Nietzschean morality present in his earlier film for
something closer to a Kantian moral imperativism which illustrates
an overarching thesis over exploring a man's existence. The
question in the earlier film was, what does a man need to
exist, what sort of ethical code does he need to keep himself
alive? Where the question had an air of internal necessity
in his debut, here it becomes an external conceit: how absurd
man is when pursuing revenge.
What Noé's working with in Irréversible, where
he reverses the story chronologically so we start with brutal
revenge and end on life's simple pleasures, is a double, perhaps
even triple assumption. Time, he tells us, heals all wounds,
bourgeois morality is preferable to atavistic desire, and
cosmology conquers all. Yet within each assumption there's
also a simplified exploration. Time heals all is illustrated
not in time as forward momentum but as reverse conceit. In
Noé's take time heals because he (Noé the filmmaker)
aesthetically reverses it. The ontological idea of time -
the idea that past time fades and accumulated layers of more
recent time obliterates it, creating in the self hints, flashes
and allusions to a past self that's all but lost to time,
is replaced by the filmmaker's time. But this filmmakers'
time doesn't generate indeterminacy, the way, say, In The
Mood for Love makes past memory fallible so that the truth
of an event can no longer be discerned, it instead generates
assertiveness, a cinematic cleverness also on show in Memento,
Fight Club and Pulp Fiction. Time heals because
Noé, by reversing his structure, shows that it can.
He reduces complex being to cinematic assertiveness.
Secondly there's bourgeois morality, though bourgeois morality
shot through with a Peckinpah-esque belief in the egg-head
capable of violence as extreme as the most violent criminal
(Noé has talked of admiring Straw Dogs, and
it's of course finally not Cassel but his intellectual best
friend who destroys a thug's face with a fire extinguisher).
But even this works off an easy conceit. It's an amusing idea
that where Cassel is the testosterone-fuelled fool determined
to avenge his lover's rape even though she got in the rape
situation because of Cassel's actions with other women (she
leaves a party alone in disgust), it's her ex-lover, Albert
Dupontel, who actually commits the deed. Once again, though,
what we have is irony where we could have indeterminacy. Bourgeois
morality holds as Noé doesn't question the morality,
he simply questions the egg-head's motives. Dupontel might
be more intellectual than Cassel, but he still can't escape
those primitive Hobbesian urges as his obvious desire for
Bellucci manifests itself in an horrific act of violence.
The third assumption resides in cosmological irony. Man is
contained by a cosmic emanation that makes his petty concerns
seem irrelevant. The film more or less ends with Bellucci
pregnant and a high-angled camera rotating round her as she
lies on the grass with Noé suggesting a world much
wider than Bellucci and the story we've been told. Here we
might be reminded of Seul Contre Tous's ending, with the camera
retreating from the butcher's hotel room to the empty street.
But any cosmological perspective came out of a close observation
of a man's soul. The butcher had reached a state where he'd
arrived at a fundamental humanity where he sees himself not
as a failed social ego - the way he perceives himself throughout
the film - but a being amongst beings: a soul within a wider
system of souls. It's this idea of the significance of a soul
that demands the butcher lives, though in terms of narrative
event (beating his mistress, abusing his daughter) we might
wish to see him dead.
Read
Paul Duane's 1999 interview
with Gaspar Noé
The
full text of this article is printed in Film Ireland
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