Irreversible (2002) – “Time destroys everything.” And then some.

Sometimes you watch movies to be entertained, to relax and take a peak into some different mode of living. This is not a movie for those times. Irreversible (2002) is artistically uncompromising, the violence portrayed in it is visceral and difficult to distance yourself from in a way that will most likely leave many a viewer nauseous and ill at ease. It is supposed to, that is the whole purpose.

The story is told in reverse order, starting at its most brutal and bloody point. It is not the catharsis of justified violence that you can sometimes find in action and thrillers. The way the viewer is introduced into the narrative seems so random and incongruous that your curiosity is awakened along with a sense of foreboding, even if things are already about as bad as they can get.

The scene is set for the unraveling of something inevitable. The only question left is what has led up to this point. The key players are Alex (Monica Bellucci) and her boyfriend Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and their friend Pierre (Albert Dupontel) and the bad guy Le Tenia (Jo Prestia). When when enter the action a man has been brutally beaten to death in a local gay fetish club. As the event unfolds themselves in reverse the viewer is led through the inferno of the the club through a mad search through Paris for a man called Le Tenia and further back to the brutal assault on Alex and then even further back to a party and the evening before the party. The end, which is the chronological beginning, is actually a beautiful idyllic setting in a park where Alex is sitting in the sunshine surrounded by children and families, reading a book. The very last scene, the coda which is the beginning in reverse order, states simple “Le temps detruit tout”, time destroys everything. It seems like a pretty trite piece of wisdom, but after having been through the descent into the very nethermost regions of hell and the lowest representation of human nature, it is still poignant.

The camera pans wildly every time the scene is about to change, every time the viewer is taken back one step in time, in a dizzying three hundred and sixty degrees spin. It is not pleasant to watch, rather it becomes a harbinger, something that heightens the sense of dread and foreboding. The reverse order of events also means we start at the meanest, darkest point and move toward lighter better things. That does nothing to soothe the sense that things have gone awry in an irreparable way, that the three main characters lives are never going to be the same, that something has been so badly broken that it can never be put back right again.

That is what the violence does, in this particular narrative. The vicious assault on the lovely Alex, played excellently by Monica Belluci, is definitely one of the most difficult rape scenes I have ever seen. The static camera is unrelenting, as is the violence, and it doesn’t give the viewer any reprieve in a tactful averting of eyes. Not only is the viewer asked to bear witness to the violation, the aggressor Le Tenia also beats Alex to a bloody pulp before he is done with her. It might seem like this could be gratuitous, but the problem, or the brilliance of it, is that it is too realistic, or maybe even naturalistic, to be in any way something that caters to an objectifying gaze.

The resulting chase through the underbelly of the French gay scene in search of Le Tenia shows an increasingly fraying Marcus followed by Pierre, who starts out as trying to be the voice of reason, though that ends up being a terrible miscalculation. The fact of the matter is that revenge is a loser’s game, not surprising, and it’s so utterly pointless in this particular narrative that there really is no reprieve for neither the characters, nor the viewer.

Not all movies mean to tie up everything in a nice big bow of morality and easy lessons. This is a brutal, dark, harrowing tale that shows how something can be so thoroughly broken that it will never be put right and that events can turn even the most unassuming protagonist into what he himself despises. The fact that the story is told with such passion and artistic daring only drives that home. And it is daring to make something as provocative and unpleasant as this, something that intends to upset and nauseate the viewer through its use of camera angles, a grating, harsh soundtrack and an unflinching approach to brutal, sadistic violence.

This is a difficult movie to watch, both in content and in artistic style, and it stays with you once the screen has gone dark. Thought provoking and controversial content means you have to be willing to take on the task of sitting through a narrative that is not going to leave you unmoved, but that is in no way easy fare. If you are willing to do that, though, this movie will richly reward you.

Irreversible (2002) is directed by Gaspar Noé and stars Monica Bellucci (Alex), Vincent Cassel (Marcus), Albert Dupontel (Pierre), Jo Prestia (Le Tenia), Philippe Nahon (L’homme), Stéphane Drouot (Stéphan), Jara-Millo (Concha).

Article first published as Movie Review Irreversible (2002) on Blogcritics.

Eastern Promises – So much more than just a gangster movie

Article first published as DVD Review: Eastern Promises: So Much More Than Just a Gangster Movie on Blogcritics.

First, a confession. I am a huge Cronenberg fan. I like his violently red vision in classics like The Brood (1979) and Scanners (1981), but even more the eerily disturbing Dead Ringers (1988), Crash (1996) and Spider (2002). Naked Lunch (1991) and Videodrome (1983) have their own hallucinogenic lunacy that disturbs in a different way.

Eastern Promises begins with a birth and a death, coinciding and overlapping. Tatiana (Sarah-Jeanne Labrosse), a young Russian girl, stumbles into a pharmacy begging for help. She promptly passes out in a puddle of her own blood. She is rushed to the hospital where the midwife Anna Khitrova (Naomi Watts) is one of the medical team working on her. Tatiana does not survive the birth. She leaves behind a child and a diary written in Russian which Anna tries to use to track down any family the girl might have.

Anna unwittingly stumbles into the violent criminal Russian underworld of London. She enlists the help of a seemingly respectable Russian restaurant owner, Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl) to help her translate the diary. Little does she know that Semyon is actually responsible for Tatiana’s condition and that he is a part of the Vory v Zakonye (“thieves in law”) a criminal organization.

Nikolai Luzhin (Viggo Mortensen) is working as a driver for the organization, and he is close to both Semyon and his son Kirill (Vincent Cassel). Anna lands herself squarely in the middle of more trouble than she can handle when she starts getting involved with Semyon, not knowing that Tatiana was working in one of his brothels and that Semyon is the one who impregnated her.

Nikolai is actually not what he seems to be at first glance, either. It turns out that he is working under cover to try and infiltrate the Vory, an operation that has been a long time in the making and which is now in part jeopardized by Anna’s involvement.

This could so easily have been another bad-accented gangster exploitation movie if handled by another director, but instead it has depth and weight. Every action is underscored by a wealth of background work and there’s a fullness to the telling that shows how much is left unsaid.

Viggo Mortensen and Vincent Cassel both impress and come across as completely plausible Russian gangsters. The lines spoken in Russian sound true enough and their broken English rings just as true, which is a relief. The interaction between their two characters Nikolai and Kirill is underscored by a kind of romance and seduction that is really interesting to watch. Kirill’s troubled relationship with his father is of the variety you would expect to see in a Greek play, and all this comes into play in the action, but with the sliding subtlety of a master craftsman’s handling. Naomi Watts is completely believable as a midwife and her character has depth and a richness to it that isn’t common for either the genre, nor for female characters as a whole.

The action starts in medias res and it ends the same way and it actually took me a while to settle on why. This is not Anna’s story, or Kirill’s, or even Nikolai’s. This is the story of the fourteen year old Tatiana, whose diary runs as a red thread in her voice-over through the action and even rounds it off when we get the closing shot of Nikolai at Semyon’s restaurant. But even more than that, this is actually the baby’s story. Tatiana’s child is the main focus here, and that is actually so cleverly done that it underscores the violence and gives it a human resonance. Kirill’s moment of anagnorisis comes when he is gently persuaded to not kill the child and gives in to Nikolai.

There are many things to commend this movie, little moments like when Semyon demonstrates his ability to play the fiddle to two of his young nieces, or when Nikolai handles the post-mortem dismemberment of a rival gangster with the ease of someone who has done it all before, or the fight sequence in the Turkish bath where Nikolai takes on two fully dressed rival gangsters completely buck naked making him so blatantly vulnerable you wince for him when he gets thrown across the room. There are other things too, like the young man who is obviously of diminished capacity, but who kills and gets killed because he can’t grasp the full extent of his situation. There are many things like that and that is more than enough to make this a well above par gangster movie.

Eastern Promises is directed by David Cronenberg staring Naomi Watts (Anna), Viggo Mortensen (Nikolai), Vincent Cassel (Kirill), Armin Mueller-Stahl (Semyon), Josef Altin (Ekrem), Mina E. Mina (Azim), Aleksander Mikic (Soyka), Sarah-Jeanne Labrosse (Tatiana), Sinéad Cusack (Helen), Jerzy Skolimowski (Stephan).

La Haine

Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz this 1995 movie centers around three young men, Vinz (Vincent Cassel), Hubert (Hubert Koundé) and Said (Said Taghmaoui).

The action takes place in a French suburb where the three gentlemen have grown up. We enter the story just as a riot has been playing out and there are police in the streets, burning cars and violence all around. The film is shot in black and white which lends a stylized quality to the action and elevates it to something more generally applicable. But the environment is definitely the suburban sprawl of a major city, the “ghetto” landscape with all its huge towering buildings completely dwarfing the actors. It’s not a friendly landscape to live in and you do get the sense that it’s not really meant for people.

During the riots one of the guy’s friends is shot by the police and one of the police has dropped his gun – uh oh. Oops? Well, Vinz is the one who found the gun and in some misguided attempt to even the score between himself and society at large he decides that if his friend dies he’s going to shoot a cop.

It’s stupid and it’s ridiculous and of course it’s not going to help or work or do the least bit of difference or good.

There’s a beautiful line in there somewhere where Hubert tells the story of the man who falls from the fiftieth floor and to calm himself he keeps repeating “so far, so good” for every level he passes. It’s not the fall you have to worry about, it’s the landing.

And that is the overall metaphor for the entire sequence of events.

The frustration and pointlessness of their lives is evident in the way ot all plays out around them, the way the police and reporters and outsiders are seen as a threat, and there’s some pride in “their part of town”, but at the same time they hate it there. Vinz calls himself a street-kid and means it. School never did him any good and he won’t get out of there. Hubert desperately wants to get out, but during the riots the gym where he boxes has been burnt down and that seems to symbolize his hopes of getting away being destroyed. Said’s big brother is something of a leader in the gang-culture we’ve landed in, but Said is mostly a fuck-up and a petty criminal who doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

There is of course significance in the fact that the three are friends, despite them being one jew, one arab and a black kid, they have more in common in being outcast and disenfranchised than what separates them. That’s not the way these things usually look, but it still makes a point.

Vinz keeps saying he will shot a cop and Hubert keeps trying to tell him how foolish that is, but they never seem to get to the crux of the thing until very, very late in the game when Vinz actually realizes he can’t pull the trigger.

That doesn’t mean there is a happy ending here. Of course there isn’t.

It doesn’t mean there are any clear back and white answers to who is the good guys and who is a bad guy either. The police are not always particularly nice and the fires started in the ghetto actually only target the ghettos own inhabitants, like a rabbit gnawing its own foot while caught in a trap. The pointlessness in hitting out at someone doesn’t really help.

Sadly, there’s a real life tangent here. I stumbled into a documentary about urban city kids and there’s not a lot of distinction between that and this movie. Some of the arguments felt the same, sounded the same, which means this is close enough to realism for it to be of weight. What struck me as particularly poignant was the way media treats anything that happens in this kind of environment. The kids in the documentary and the kids in La Haine said pretty much the same thing – media makes a chicken out of a feather when something happens, they give all the negative aspects a lot of time and room, but never mention any of the many positive things that actually happen too.  It’s that whole art/life thing.

Well worth the time, is what I would say about this one.  Tragic, gritty and actually quite funny along the way.

MULE

Blueberry

Directed by Jan Kounen 2004. Starring Vincent Cassel as Mike Blueberry, Juliette Lewis as Maria Sullivan, Michael Madsen as Wallace Blount, Temouera Morrison as Runi.

This is one of those movies. You’re either going to buy into it or you will hate it.

It has an excellent cast, complete with Ernest Borgnine (sheriff) Eddie Izzard (Prosit), Tchécky Karyo (uncle) and Geoffrey Lewis (Greg Sullivan) in supporting roles.

It is visually stunning. I mean it. It might have something to do with it being based on a comic by Moebius, who is actually involved in the project on the writer list.

Let’s get something straight right from the get go. This is a Western. It looks absolutely incredible in that completely archaic way that has nothing to do with reality. And I, for one, like that. I don’t need realism, thank you very much. And I certainly don’t need it all the time. Just look Cassel’s body language, he could have stepped right out of the page of a Moebius strip.

The main theme is spiritual corruption and shamanism. The director saw fit to warn about this in an extra on the DVD, which I luckily didn’t see beforehand. I like to submit to the willing suspension of disbelief in cases like this. There are some pretty heady CGI graphics and stuff too that seem to rile people judging from what I’ve seen in the viewer response. I don’t mind these either, they have managed to keep them pretty organic and that fits with the general theme of spirit journeys or shamanistic trance. Drug induced visions. Pretty stuff.

Even if this is a standard cowboy-meets-Indian-lore story it does take it’s own tack on it and again, stunning visuals. I don’t mean just the visionary elements, but more than that the overall look and feel. The Indians deep in the forest, the cowboys in the desert, the townfolks in the settlement. Crossroads where they bump into each other… all of it has its own look and texture.

There are several elements to the story. One is revenge, another love, another greed. You could probably find all the sins of the flesh in there without looking too hard. Good cowboy western movies usually have some kind of revenge theme going on. In this case the big conflict is between Blueberry and Blount. It has a nice twist to it once you get into the spiritual realm. There are several other minor conflicts going on at the same time – towns folk versus Indians, law and order versus crooks. We also have the saloon girl and the respectable lady, the corrupt landowner and all the standard accoutrements.

Some quirks come from the choice in casting. Cassel is given a Cajun background and that fits well with his French accent. If you can’t recognize Karyo in any other way (and it’s kind of hard to) you’ll know him too by his French. Borgnine is a funny wink at the genre and Juliette Lewis is a surprisingly convincing frontier woman.

You can make what you will of the rest of it. It is kind of hazy and dreamy in places and I generally don’t go in for stories that hinge on the notion of the noble savage. This one does not hit you upside the head with the morality of it all, and I guess that’s why it works for me.

All in all I think it deserves more attention and recognition than it has gotten so far.

Mule