The return of Irreversible, the film with which Bellucci and Cassel caused a scandal in 2003
Per Venezia 76 re-edited in chronological order by the director Gaspar Noé.
Monica Bellucci's r-pe scandal scene is always the same. Same attacker, same smelly underpass seventeen years ago, same director. And, of course, the same movie. With the only difference that it was reassembled in reverse. Or rather, in the correct sense, in chronological order. Gaspar Noè chose Venice to present the “integral inversion” of Irreversible, his cursed film that there was a time when many would have gladly burned it at the stake. Possibly together with its director. But today, both of them are considered cult, and the film, in particular, a curious historical document, very intim-te and true in immortalizing what was the intim-te and intim-te relationship between Vincent Cassel and Monica Bellucci, in the liveliest moment of their historic relationship, which has now come to an end.
It was 2002 when Irreversible was presented with great scandal at the Cannes Film Festival. At the time Noah was just a young Franco-Argentine filmmaker whom someone, previously, perhaps had noticed for a medium-length and a long film intrinsically linked together - Carne and Seoul contre tous -, also provocative, but not to such an extent. Curiosity has it that the film began, and today ends, with the same character of the incestuous butcher, played by Philippe Nahon, the protagonist of those two other works, as if to suggest a continuity, if not of the story, certainly of the themes.
BIM, a well-known Italian distribution house of auteur films that had acquired the rights, released Irreversible in our cinemas at the same time as its Cannes presentation. A marketing strategy to ride the tam tam of the protests that came from the Croisette and at the same time alleviate the commercial damage that a ban on minors under the age of 18 can inevitably create at the box office.
I still remember how it was yesterday the impulsive reaction, in the gut, hatched up to that moment without premeditation, of the spectator who, sitting next to me, followed the film as long as his nerves allowed it. Then, after the infamous and unsustainable real-time sequence of Bellucci's sodomy and humiliation, he nonchalantly jumped to his feet and left the room, inveighing against the screen: "What a shit man!"
If the curse were directed at Gaspar Noè, who forced us, without ever taking the camera away, to watch this unspeakable act of violence, or at the character of Tenia played by French character actor Jo Prestia, the pimp with a boxer's nose who transforms the splendid Alex (Bellucci) into meat for slaughter, I still wonder now. What is certain is that such a reaction is symptomatic of the subversive charge of a film which, like no other, neither before nor after, dared to represent violence against a woman with such shocking realism and repulsion.
Today, as then, Irreversible is a film that leaves you dismayed and frightening. Even in its "integral inversion". At the end of the film, the journalists who attended the screening for the press - few indeed - were almost intimidated, if not reluctant, to applaud. As if showing their liking for this film were taboo or could somehow make them complicit in the r-pe.
The truth is that, revised today, and in this linear version that diverts attention from the technical and stylistic virtuosity that originally could have been an end in itself, Irreversible manages to be even more current and unpleasant than then. For what he says and how he says it. "A woman got r-ped". This sentence, uttered by an anonymous passer-by at the crime scene, is probably the joke that hurts more than many other situations in the film. Because it brings us directly back to our days, to the news that we read daily in the newspapers. And what, unfortunately, seems to be the way many people understand when they express themselves on cases of female violence. As if in the end it was their fault, of the women, who go looking for her.
In short, in an era of feminicides and post-feminist movements, Irreversible has the merit of making us feel dirty, guilty. While we helplessly witness the annihilation of femininity, embodied by Monica Bellucci in the full splendor of her beauty; but even later, when Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and his friend Pierre (Albert Dupontel) enter the infernal Rectum, the place of perdition for only gays, determined to find the Tenia and take justice for themselves, but, not recognizing him, they end up smashing another customer's head with a fire extinguisher.
If we have to make a comparison, in its original version a reboir, Irreversible immediately threw you in the most horrible of places, but, once (and if) the moment of r-pe passed, it gradually projected you towards the light, in an emotional place. of hope, of the future, of rebirth, represented by Monica's maternal womb that we ultimately discover waiting for a baby. In the "integral inversion", however, the opposite occurs. From the initial positivity and sunshine, with Marcus and Alex embraced in bed and her revealing to him that she is pregnant, we are inexorably dragged into a dark, mephitic and dead-end tunnel. Just like what poor Alex ends up in.
