by Steve Brennan

Created on: March 22, 2009

This review should begin with an admission that my knowledge of French cinema is not extensive. I've watched and enjoyed Patrice Leconte's L'Homme Du Train, and of course Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources, as should you. These are films that I happened to catch on TV at some point or another though, and not films I actively sought out because I heard they were worth watching. Irreversible, however, is a film I sought out, largely because whenever I hear of a film that has generated the kind of uproar and controversy that this did, I try to make a point of seeing it to find out what all the fuss was about. Having watched it, I'm presented with a small dilemma. Irreversible is undoubtedly an important, excellently made film, but can I recommend it to you? It's a tricky question.

Directed by Argentine-born, French-based enfant-terrible director Gasper Noye, this might just be the most mentally disturbing and emotionally wrenching film you'll ever see. When it was unleashed upon the Cannes film festival in 2002, audience reaction ranged from outraged shock, to vomiting and fainting, to mass walkouts. It is, to say the least, not a film that invites indifference. It features scenes of sickeningly intense violence, prolonged sexual assualt, and, in its opening twenty minutes, camera work seemingly co-ordinated by a glue-sniffing Dali fan. It's also thoroughly depressing, and even distressing to watch. As a film experience, it is not one that will give much pleasure or entertainment, if any. Nevertheless, it is a film which, should you be of a strong constitution and not easily offended, I would have to recommend, as it provides a narcotically visceral hit, the like of which you will be hard pressed to find elsewhere.

The film is, in one sense, a straightforward tale of violence perpetrated and revenge taken, except that it is not straightforward at all. The storyline is simple and uncluttered, following the events of one evening in the lives of three people, but they are presented, as per Memento, in reverse. Hence, the film begins at its climax, and each scene thereafter takes us further back in the evening to show us the preceding events. It's an intriguing device clearly designed to throw the film's explicitly stated theme ("Le temps detruit tout" - time destroys everything) into sharp focus, in which, it has to be said, it succeeds.

Following a brief and ever-so-French existential exchange in a tenement bedroom between an old man and a companion, the film begins

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