Was a bizarre movie "Irreversible" that starred Monica Bellucci
We don’t see Bellucci for almost the entire first half of Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible – which, because the film’s scenes play in reverse order, is the last half of the story. She plays Alex, a pretty Parisian who’s r*ped at knifepoint then beaten unconscious on her way home from a house party.
Until that moment, Irreversible has centred on Alex’s boyfriend Marcus (played by Bellucci’s now-estranged husband Vincent Cassel) and her ex-lover Pierre (Albert Dupontel), as they exact unspeakably violent revenge on the man they believe to have carried out the attack. But as time rewinds, Alex herself moves centre-stage, and the victim is allowed to reclaim control of her own story.
No filmmaker to date has better understood Bellucci’s physicality than Noé. For the party scene and its horrific aftermath, he clothes the actress in a silk dress as flimsy as one of Jean Harlow’s negligées, which has the brilliant, nerve-tightening effect of making her look vulnerable without looking weak. Our first proper view of Alex is a shot of her back as she heads towards the underpass, and there’s a feline control to Bellucci’s movement that the actress may have borrowed from her previous modelling career – her walk is halfway between a strut and a slink. After the attack, her shuddering terror is a masterclass in physical acting, as angular and wounding as a broken pane of glass.
