"People were leaving the room": the crudest and most realistic r-pe scene in cinema history
Irreversible is a French film released in 2002, starring actors Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel, told in reverse chronological order, and which was a huge box office success at the time. Although many people did not finish seeing the film despite having paid their ticket, due to the horror they felt for a scene.
The film went down in history for including the crudest and most realistic r-pe scene in the history of cinema, as several critics of the seventh art have said, and that made it a cult work.
"Irreversible is a film so violent and cruel that most people will find it impossible to see it," thus began his review by Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, perhaps the most renowned film critic of recent decades.
The expert gave a positive assessment of the film and highlighted the use of violence as a tool and the way in which r-pe was treated, although recalling how crude the scenes were.
“That the film has a serious purpose is to its credit, but it doesn't make it any more bearable. Some of the critics at the screening left, but I stayed, sometimes closing my eyes”, Ebert added in his review where he explains how to record the film.
There are about 9 minutes of a sequence shot, where Alex (Bellucci) is attacked by a character identified as 'La Tenia' (Jo Prestia). At the beginning of the attack, the camera is located on the ground, so that during the entire violation only the outrage is observed, there is no other scene interspersed, there is no music, no distractions in the environment (only the brief appearance of an extra) . The scene is just the brutal s-xual attack, his insults and the victim's moans. The camera only moves at the end, when the assailant destroys the victim's face.
Those 9 minutes remained forever in the history of cinema and even at the last Venice Film Festival, last August, the film was re-released, although now in chronological format, just as it was recorded.
The director of the film, the Franco-Argentine Gaspar Noé, told the newspaper La Nación de Argentina in 2003 that he decided to record the scene because several people had told him that they had been victims of r-pe, for what he considered to be a type of of violence that had not been treated in the cinema.
“I know many people - not only women - who have been r-ped in one way or another, by strangers or by people close to them. These people have told me their stories, sometimes with pain. Why can't that be represented in the cinema and, instead, murders, wars or espionage stories that in reality occur less frequently than r-pes? It is important to represent everyday violence instead of avoiding those painful themes precisely because they are close. People can leave the cinema stronger if they see those experiences represented on the screen”, Noé declared on the occasion.
The filmmaker explained that the film and the scene (which serves as the plot of the film) are a representation of the bestiality that can transform any human being or specifically any man.
“This film is a representation of the masculine bestiality that can surface in any man, because the two friends who decide to take revenge are civilized people (…) The reaction of the people was similar everywhere: one half left the room offended and the another, delighted ”, he explained.
A similar look was presented by Cassel in an interview with the British newspaper The Guardian, who at that time was married to Bellucci and who in the film seeks revenge on the aggressor, which ended in another cult scene (the beating with the extinguisher).
“It's a moral movie, but it's also nihilistic. It shows us the animal that is in us. The main problem for the public is that they don't want to see the animal in all of us. Gaspar's film forces us to see that animal”, he indicated.
For his part, Bellucci has publicly acknowledged that it is difficult for him to see the scene, unlike other films and in an interview with the American portal Blackfilm in 2003 he said that he kept a dress similar to the one used in the recording, but that he has never been able to use it.
“When I see the scene, I tell you that I am still bewildered because it is filmed in such a realistic way (…) I am a woman and I have never been r-ped in my life but I am sure that it is the worst thing that can happen, so I am sure that it touched something inside of me. He touched something that maybe I don't know what it is; it was so deep and that's why I couldn't touch this dress anymore,” she recounted.
