I love the way this film makes you jump back to previous (later, chronologically) parts of the movie, making one constantly reevaluate events that occurred under a new light which eventually becomes available. But, first off, the rape scene. That was brutal. How the fuck did Gaspar Noé film that?? I mean the ending where he bashes her head into the ground and it flies up with skin flaking off the forehead, was that digitally inserted later, right?? Had to be. How can make-up artists apply a job in 0.5 second? Still, these matter aside, this is a great film for human beings to watch, and, in the case of that section specifically, endure.

Marcus’s initial fury and destruction seems implacable surely, but what is more important, it is impossible to place and fathom. One cannot understand why this man is hellbent and virulently full of rage. Later of course, enter left: the context. The debasing of Alex, Marcus’s current girlfriend, is done with the utmost sinister care and stubborn resolution that it becomes so incomparably reprehensible, so difficult to physically look at, that Marcus’s previous thrash through the grimy halls of The Rectum seems wholly justifiable. I cannot speak for other viewers obviously, but I was so pissed off that after the horror of the scene had ended, right around when Marcus and Pierre were messing around in the upstairs bathroom, that I actually wished that the beginning of the film were reinserted into the film’s structure as an explosive exercise in psychological release. I needed to see Marcus beat the living shit out of everyone in his path, be it morally right, or be it abhorrent anew. I felt Marcus’s boiling anger. As proof, what had originally felt as needlessly gratuitous to me when Pierre relentlessly bashed the skull of ‘Le Tenia’ in, I now felt great about. The original scathing image of the crumbled in skin and brain matter of the man only now served to soothe my shouting nerves.

But then, Irreversible did not end it just there. The second half of the film only makes one remember the rape scene that much more acutely. The contrast, sheer contrast of these parts is astounding and something I’ve never experienced before in cinema.

But yet again, there do seem to be subtexts to the tale. Marcus, high off of cocaine and dizzy with silliness, did, indirectly, set into motion the events which led to his girlfriend’s rape. And of course, the subject of sexuality is prevalent throughout. I noticed the men were in power always. The two women in the party house were nothing more than eager vesicles ready to take in the maximum amount of dick. The girlfriend Alex was overrun by Pierre who persisted constantly to discover whether or not Marcus was able to make her orgasm. She wanted to politely, discreetly leave her personal life a mystery, a right that should be granted, but Pierre was not willing to abide her and became her dominator. Even in the confines of the intimate bedroom with just Marcus and Alex alone, Marcus often pushed her bits here and bits there clearly past her comfort zone by trapping her physically under his body, or by needing to win the spitting stand-off. There was a prevailing sense of men dominating women, again repeated in the ladyboy who spoke only Spanish on the street being trapped and hurt, albeit that was during the period of Marcus’s epic wrath. As the only moment in the film where I felt women were honestly lifted up, exalted, was when Alex was dancing with the two other women she met at the party. Their shared glances and soft gazes was an oasis in the dominating world of man, perhaps suggesting male/female sexual relationships will always devolve into their most primal roles: that of the domineering and of the submissive.

And yet, and yet, the colorful, finally bright and sunny ending of the film was perhaps a requiem for what could have been. In the final scenes, Alex, not yet knowing of her future pregnancy, feels her tummy with much hope, the camera exiting ceremoniously out of the window and into the final shot: a camera the zooms out from a relaxed Alex, reading about time no doubt, into a resting position above that spins around a focal point of a sprinkler with young kids playing peacefully around. The exact antithesis to the hellishly real rape scene comes last, in an upbeat blue and green palette. Still, the unspeakable event cannot be forgotten, tainting even this simple scene of joy and innocence.

A film of bold strokes, both repulsive and renewing. Irreversible jumps the biggest emotion gap that I have ever experienced in a film, and does it successfully. Stylistically, the film gets top marks too.