The film was released in 2002 and had one of its protagonists in the Italian actress.
In 2002, the Argentine director Gaspar Noé premiered the film "Irreversible" at the Cannes Film Festival, starring the beautiful Italian actress Mónica Bellucci and her then husband, the French actor Vincent Cassel. The film narrated, in reverse chronological order, the frantic search undertaken by two French friends, Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and Pierre (Albert Dupontel), to avenge the brutal rape perpetrated against Alex (Mónica Belluci), the former's girlfriend.
The film would unleash a real commotion due to its original temporal approach but, above all, due to the inclusion of the brutal and explicit nine-minute rape scene suffered by the female character played by Mónica Bellucci, who after being outraged in a passageway Underground she was brutally beaten by her attacker, a homos-xual who frequented a place called Rectum, who beat her head over and over against the ground, until she was unconscious.
On the day of the premiere of “Irreversible” at the Palais at the Cannes Film Festival, some 250 people left the screening room because they could not bear the level of violence in the film, which showed, apart from Alex's brutal rape, how her boyfriend and his friend, after finding the rapist, attacked and killed him, smashing his head against the ground using a fire extinguisher. Anyway, after the projection, the people who stayed to see the whole film rewarded it with a loud applause. The film would unleash mixed reactions among critics. Ángel Fernández-Santos, of the Spanish newspaper El País, said that the violence portrayed in the film was "unnecessary and immoral", while other Hispanic critics described the film as "pretentious and repulsive, an empty film with obscene and disgusting images" and like a "reactionary mess".
Elvis Mitchell, a critic of the New York Times, criticized the construction of the rape scene, arguing that “Alex escapes from a fight between her boyfriend and his friend and goes into a dark underground passage in Paris. A fatal error takes place here. Alex is wearing a dress so fine that it is more of a membrane than a piece of clothing. No woman would be so reckless to go into such a gloomy area that you can almost hear the fluttering of bats. Women are generally much more aware of the potential danger on the streets than men. It is at this point that 'Irreversible' is an irresponsible film. Lord Noah is surreptitiously saying that she is causing them to rape her. "
Faced with the virulence of these criticisms, the director Gaspar Noé would defend himself by stating that "" people have gone crazy accusing me of misogyny and homophobia and that is stupid. The fact that you have characters that reflect aspects of the human being does not mean that you agree with them ”. However, other renowned critics, such as the famous American critic Roger Ebert, valued the film and its novel narrative bet, since the film, as already mentioned, advanced from back to front, that is, the first thing that the audience saw was really the end of the story, while the end of the film was the beginning of it, showing the happy couple with the revelation that Alex's character was pregnant. "The reverse chronology makes 'Irreversible' a film that structurally argues against rape and violence, while the ordinary chronology would lead us down a seductive narrative path of scandalous and exploitative compensation," Ebert opined, giving a boost to one of the most controversial tapes of the new millennium.
Actress Monica Bellucci, recalling how the scene of the brutal rape of her character had been filmed, related that the filming of that scene lasted two days and was repeated up to six times, and that her partner at that time, the actor Vincent Cassel, refused to shoot the film at first: “He said that what Noah had in mind was too strong, too hard for both of us. We had both worked together before, but we had never gotten this far. In the end, I made the decision to play that movie on instinct. And I do not regret it. It was the work of a great director, a film that is still debated ”.
The director Gaspar Noe, together with the two protagonists of the film, Mónica Belluci and Vincent Cassel (who would divorce a few years ago), would meet again recently to present the new version of the film in a special session at the Venice Film Festival. "Irreversible", with a new montage, called "Irreversible, Straight cut", including in any case in its footage the controversial and crude scenes that scandalized viewers and critics almost 20 years ago.
