Irreversible is a French film, written, directed and produced by Gaspar Noé that was released in 2002. All scenes in the film are mounted in a reverse chronological order: The film begins with the end of the story and ends at the beginning of the latter. After the rape of his wife (Monica Belucci), Marcus (Vincent Cassel), accompanied by his best friend Pierre (Albert Dupontel), decided to find the culprit. The film has raised the polemic by the intensity of the scenes of violence that may offend the sensitivity of the spectator. In fact, these scenes (Physical aggression and rape) are projected onto the screen in a complete adequacy with the definition given by Gilles Deleuze to the time-image: The time-image being essentially characterized by its ability to show a pure image of time: the time appears by itself, it is an image that shows pure optical and sound situations.
Indeed, as Garett Stewart mentioned “It is a discourse about time, while merely a story about death and aborted futurity”. As the title of the movie itself suggests, the story is mainly about the impossibility of going back in time, to anticipate the future, to make up the time. The film is a set of a dozen long master shots: from the final scene of revenge (failed) until the scene showing the couple's happiness, shortly before the tragedy.
With a project as ambitious as that posed by Gaspard Noe in this film (representing "a cosmic view of temporality"), one wonders why the film fails to achieve this aim, to represent, “the psychosomatic contours of human temporality and human memory "?
It seems to us that failure is rooted in the neglect of several important points to the consistency of a movie: First, the characters lack depth in the sense that the viewer is unable to have a more or less synoptic view of their psychology: about that, Gaspar Noe, said that he had recourse to improvisation, the shooting had begins with four pages of script that the actors filled gradually meanwhile the filming of the scenes. At this point, several questions may arise: At this point, one could underline that successful actors are not always successful screenwriters; that a good artwork is a combination of an interesting structure and a developed thematic (developed character profile) and not one of them, and finally that within a reversed chronology, he should have included a reversed chronological portrait of the characters that does not rely only on images but more on dialogues, on speech. Perhaps the blurring of identity regarding the characters was to include them in a more universal perspective, but still, this idea fails with the cast and more precisely with the choice of Monica Belucci.
Indeed, with Monica Belucci in the role of the raped women, the story exceeds the committed dimension that denounced the violence against women and settled instead in a sort of 'cosmetics of the violence "in the sense that rape is shown in adequacy with the definition of ‘time-image’, that is to say in its actual duration , but this latter becomes an image that offers a scene which crystallize violent sexual common fantasies of domination toward a woman who corresponds to the criteria of a modern feminine beauty.
In this regard, one might ask whether the film director wanted to attract the viewer's attention on the atrocities of rape or did he simply wanted to make a buzz by creating a polemic with a hardcore scene whose success would be more than predictable: At this point, the universalist dimension of the story would acquire more sense with an actress whose physical appearance is ordinary, that we can identify with Mrs anybody rather to Monica Belucci in a mild dress. But here, one should clearly identify Gaspard Noe’s ambitions: whether he wanted to satisfy a voyeuristic spectator or getting him involved, being the witness of a rape tragedy.
Also, it is important to mention that including marginal figures such as prostitutes or transvestites is not enough to make a subversive film that actually deals with the question of the norm and its transgression, also including the 7th symphony of Beethoven at the end of the film is not enough to make the final image as sublime as the film director might imagined.