Review of Irreversible (2002) by Rodrigo C — 26 Sep 2010

?Arrete! Arrete! Arrete!? Monica Bellucci shouts throughout the movie, and not only during ?that? scene. Mais, il n?arrete, jamais. The film just keeps going, showing us what we want to see, but at the same time, sort of don?t want to see. It was always going to be difficult to make a movie like this interesting, after throwing away its piece de resistance so liberally in the first half. But it does just about remain interesting. The final sequence feels like a bizarre quasi-eulogy for its own demise. Of course, everything?s meaning in the movie is turned on its head, and means something different depending on which direction you are considering the movie to be going. For example, Bellucci?s remark about premonitory dreams being a glimpse to what is to come has to us a sinister overtone, due to what we have already witnessed. But to the characters she.

Shares it with, it has almost no meaning at all.

It occurs to me that 'exploitation' cinema works on two levels. The form and the theme. In terms of the latter, a character (usually a female) is exploited before the viewer's eyes. In terms of the former, the word 'exploitation' refers to the way in which a terrible act of violence is set up to give the characters an excuse to deliver a violent denouement - such as an act of revenge. It's a tedious formula rarely done well any more, and so Irreversible quite literally turns it on its head. Maybe this makes it the 'anti-exploitation'. Sure, thematically we still have our exploitation set-piece, but formally it is not quite so familiar. From the viewer's perspective, the characters on-screen no longer have any motivation to exploit the situation and spill some blood, but instead backtrack sequentially into their ordinary origins.