![]() ![]() No intimacy coordinators were involved on set - in the early 2000s, the profession was nonexistent - but the scene was actively rehearsed, with all the actors’ movements mapped out to create the illusion of a beating. The mostly static camera makes us hyper-aware of our passivity as spectators but unlike the faceless figure in the distance whom we briefly see stumbling upon the rape and choosing to walk away, we’re forced to watch. The rapist (Jo Prestia) puts a knife to Alex’s throat, forcing her to comply over the course of nine excruciatingly long minutes. “Moving the camera around would have felt like it was participating in the violence, like it was the ghost of some other complicit man,” Noé said. Shot on location in a real underpass frequented by prostitutes at the outskirts of Paris (the passage has since been demolished), the rape sequence is like the eye of a storm in a film distinguished by its frenzied visuals. “He told me he needed to meet me because he copied me!” Noé said, referring to an encounter with Chazelle in Paris.īut for many people, nothing in “Irreversible” surpasses the horrors of its most talked-about scene. It’s an unforgettably sinister moment, one that the director Damien Chazelle pays homage to in his latest film, “Babylon,” when Tobey Maguire’s drug-addled criminal kingpin leads a tour through a cave of depravities. club - a real one whose clients served as extras - so the onlookers watch in fascination and shout excitedly as the two men attack. His madness is infectious, inciting Pierre into action, which results in an innocent man’s face turned to bloody mush. In one scene, Marcus enters Rectum, a hardcore gay club, tumbling down a crimson rabbit hole filled with leather-clad men, bondage swings and chain restraints, maniacally searching for the assailant. Indeed, the world of “Irreversible” is one of primitive brutes. “In a way, the new version is both more sentimental and darker,” Noé said in a video interview, explaining that it emphasizes the pointlessness of Marcus’s vengeance-seeking. “Irreversible: Straight Cut” is currently playing in theaters in the United States, and will be released, along with the original cut, on Blu-ray in July thanks to the cult distributor Altered Innocence. Though the film was always conceived as a story in reverse, it was shot chronologically, which allowed Noé to assemble a new version, the “Straight Cut,” that flips the order of events into linear time. It forces us to question the entire relationship between rape and revenge,” Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, a critic and the author of numerous books on rape-revenge movies, wrote in an email. “By reversing the formula, ‘Irreversible’ strips away the unspoken logic that dominates these kinds of films. ![]() Then the couple’s cozy, Edenlike apartment - a space that will never be the same. Then the party that Alex will decide to leave by herself. First, her boyfriend, Marcus (Vincent Cassel), goes on a rampage through the streets of Paris in search of the culprit. “Irreversible” envisions the night of Alex’s assault in reverse chronological order. But in “Irreversible,” the moment arrives toward the end, well after Alex enters the red tunnel and is brutalized by a random man - an indelible scene at the heart of Gaspar Noé’s infamous rape-revenge film, released 20 years ago this week. And then the tunnel broke in half.” In any other thriller, this uncanny vision would play like a warning for things to come. In bed with her lover, Alex (Monica Bellucci) recounts a dream: “I was in a tunnel.
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