This past weekend was the first weekend in I don’t know how long that I had absolutely nothing to do requiring my immediate attention. I mean, there was a lot I could have done, but nothing too pressing. I finished the second draft of my pilot the weekend before and submitted it to Slamdance, and so after having agonized over it for months and months, I finally felt a sense of peace and underlying anxiety. What next? Lots of television.

I mostly binged Brooklyn Nine-Nine. I’m late to the party on that one but it’s a really hilarious show. Then I watched a film that has been on my IMDB watchlist for some time now. It’s called Irreversible and it’s a French film starring Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel. I’m probably late to the party on this one too, but better late than never says the general population. I came across it on IMDB message boards where people were discussing the most disturbing movies they’ve ever seen, and as I lurked, I built up my watchlist. Irreversible did not disappoint. It was excellent… and by excellent I mean devastating and extremely disturbing. *SPOILER ALERT*

The plot is fairly simple. Alex (Monica) leaves a party early following a disagreement with her boyfriend, Marcus (Vincent). While waiting for a taxi, a stranger tells her to take the underpass since it’s supposedly faster. Unfortunately for her, she does so, runs into a pimp abusing a prostitute, and is attacked by him as the prostitute runs away. By attack I mean brutally raped and assaulted. Brutally. And she’s being put into an ambulance just as Vincent exits the party himself. After being approached by two men who convince him the police aren’t going to do anything and that they can help him find whoever committed this crime, he sets out on a quest for revenge.

I can’t stop thinking about this film. It’s complete impact really doesn’t hit you until the end. It’s told in reverse chronological order, therefore the scene in which Marcus and Pierre (Alex’s ex-boyfriend who tagged along this evening as a third wheel) enter a gay club called Rectum in search of “El Tenia” is one of the first scenes of the film. It’s very disorienting, even moreso since Marcus is in such an elevated state of rage. It’s confusing for the viewer to experience this side of Marcus since we haven’t seen Alex’s attack yet, and we’re forced to sympathize for reasons yet unknown. When no one in the club is paying attention to him because they’re too concerned with fucking each other, we vacillate between feeling Marcus’ frustration and siding with Pierre, who remains adamant that they should just leave and go to the hospital with Alex, as revenge is always a futile mission. But in the end, it’s Pierre who exacts revenge on a man who wasn’t even the perpetrator of the crime! Marcus finds two men in the club, one of them we later figure out was El Tenia, but it’s the other who attacks Marcus, breaks his arm and threatens to rape him. And then Pierre comes out of nowhere after having been logical and level-headed the entire time, and beats the crap out of that guy’s face with a fire extinguisher. I mean… he beats the crap out of this guy.

More than anything, Irreversible is a study of man’s animalistic nature. When El Tenia rapes Alex, it is nearly unwatchable because we are forced to bear witness to an act void of kindness, morality, rational thought, or anything remotely human. Most rape scenes show you just enough to think “this is terrible” in order to trigger an emotive response and guide your expectations for the remainder of the film. This film forces you to sit through its entirety, as El Tenia grunts awful obscenities at Alex, and withstand every heartbreaking moment with her. It’s a scene that sinks down into your soul and makes you truly understand the complete atrocity of rape. And as if that wasn’t enough, El Tenia finds it suitable to disfigure Alex’s face, because since she’s pretty she obviously thinks the world is hers. Then, at last he’s done with her.

When we meet Vincent, he’s at the peak of his rage. And in him, we are forced to watch a man interact with other human beings when his emotional state makes it impossible for him to do so effectively. When the two men take him and Pierre to the prostitute (after finding her ID in her purse left at the scene), Vincent nearly kills her trying to get her to tell him the name of who did it. We still haven’t seen Alex’s attack yet, but by this time Marcus has described it as rape and so we sympathize with him, yet like logical Pierre, we just want him to calm down, because nothing about his current emotional state is helpful. The prostitute tells him to look for El Tenia at Rectum and he and Pierre jump in a cab. The driver, an East Asian man who has no idea what or where Rectum is, fires Marcus’ anger even higher. Marcus lets out a string of obscenities bashing the man as Pierre profusely apologizes. There was so much screaming I don’t even really remember all that Marcus said to the driver, though I do recall “chink” and something about him being yellow and something else about fried rice. It was horrible to witness and again, we cling to Pierre in the sense that so much more could be accomplished if Marcus would just calm down and be rational. But he can’t. They end up getting out of the cab as the driver pulls some sort of gas canister from his seat. Marcus pulls the driver out, takes the can, sprays the driver, then steals the cab. Pierre has had enough at this point and refuses to go with Marcus to Rectum, but Marcus beats the windows out of the cab and belittles Pierre until he’s all but forced at gunpoint to join.

On an existential level, more than anything it’s distressing to think of how a day can start off so well, end so horrifically and how it is all ultimately irreversible. What more could be accomplished in our lives, what hurt could be avoided, if we had the option to just go back in time? Alex wouldn’t have taken that underpass. Maybe she would’ve taken Marcus’ offer to drive her home after their disagreement. Would he have even let her leave? Would they have even gone to the party at all? We find out at the end of the film that Alex took a pregnancy test earlier in the day when Marcus left out to buy alcohol. And she was pregnant. Would she have taken more precaution during sex seeing as Marcus, with all of his wild, youthful party antics, was not the man she thought him to be? Maybe, maybe not, but the most damning thought is that it doesn’t matter. We tend to dwell on everything we could have done differently if we’d just had a tad bit more wisdom, but the fact is that it is all irreversible. What is done cannot be undone. And we are at the mercy of our own actions, thoughts–our own notions of what is good and acceptable and in what circumstances we can be bad and unacceptable. Can we only be animalistic when we’ve been pushed to the very end of our proverbial rope? When we’ve been stripped by the world of everything that separates us from the animal kingdom? Or is it prudent to retain self above all, even when we have nothing, for fear of what our loss of control may bring in the future? Or… is it not even our choice at all? That appears to be the stance taken when Pierre loses it and commits murder by the end of the night.

If you haven’t seen it, I suggest you watch it once (that is all that’s necessary). It speaks volumes about the fragility of our existence on Earth, our perseverance through just a day, how thoughts manifest in life, how every occurrence in the world is cyclical in nature, always a mirror of something in the mind of another. It speaks about the resilience of humanity, the atrocity of humanity. It questions whether humanity is really even a thing to be proud of at all.

-EMB