I should say this is not for everyone. Besides the extreme violence, the cinematography could be a huge put off for some people, even causing them physical sickness. For large lengths of the film, the camera roles, spins, and does all sorts of things I could never even have imagined could be done without CGI. However, French director Gaspar Noé somehow accomplished this task, producing some frankly breathtaking shots. In addition to this, all the takes are long. While I didn't count exactly, some I'm sure were over 10 minutes long with no cuts.
The most intriguing was the intro shot. We start off, spinning every which way with no sense of direction, and eventually end up in an apartment where two men have a short conversation about life. From there we pull right out of the apartment and arc over to a crime scene. We are lowered into the scene which seems very confusing, and the audience does not know what has happened until it is overheard that someone broke their arm, and another was murdered. And without a single cut as of yet, we follow an injured man in an ambulance, all the while having swirling camera motions disorienting us.
Now this may seem pretentious, especially since a large portion of the film is shot this way, but I think it was a brilliant idea to shoot the film. It simulates chaos, confusion, rage, loss, and overwhelm; all of which are strong emotions the characters experience. However, there are also large sections of the film shot without any motion at all, allowing us to devote full attention to what is happening on screen.
Before I saw the film I thought it was just an excuse to show graphic violence on film, it is rather a film which uses graphic situations to pose questions and to explore the wide range of human emotions, and how we react when we experience particular ones. An interesting quote in the beginning of the film says, "You are an animal! Animals don't seek revenge!", or something along those lines. It doesn't make a big deal out of the line, but it is a very interesting line to think about.
One of the main themes of Irréversible, is fate. Is our destiny really already written somewhere? Do dreams or premonitions reveal our future prematurely? I really liked this theme, and I especially admired how it was represented. It was almost never actually mentioned verbally, and you really had to piece together certain lines or signs to fully grasp that a main theme was fate. But the pieces are all there, and I love piecing them together.
In relation to puzzles, the film works backwards, a la Memento, and I found it intriguing to hypothesize as to what happened before hand to make the characters do what we see them do. We see them, for example, beat a man to death, but are given no reason. The motive is slowly a gradually revealed to you as the film works from the end to the beginning. Another interesting thing is the character development all happens at the end of the film, rather than the beginning, which oddly enough works very well.
Not the easiest to watch, with scenes such as the murder and rape, which I found to be very hard to watch. But I found it defiantly worth it for the stirring and unsettling cinematography, long takes and tracking shots, as well as the characters who we slowly get to know and the situations and dialouge they engage in. The most important thing about the film which is why it is on this list is the explorations of what ‘fate’ is, and weather or not it is ‘real’. Movies on fate have always been incredibly intriguing to me, but Irreversible simply goes above and beyond most of them and ends up being a hauntingly (and shockingly) powerful film. Not for everyone, but it’s something I personally love.
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