Irreversible: Back to hell

DIRECTED BY Gaspar Noé, 2002
STARRING Monica Bellucci (Alex), Vincent Cassell (Marcus), Albert Dupontel (Pierre)
CERTIFICATION 18: Contains very strong violence, sexual violence, sex and language
RUN TIME 97 mins approx, Tartan
LANGUAGE French

COVER QUOTE 'One of the most important films in the last 20 years of movie history' - Dazed & Confused

WHY YOU SHOULD WATCH IT It's told in reverse. It stars Monica Bellucci. She gets anally raped. Oh.

THE PLOT Irreversible begins with its end credits, rolling down the screen before they skew to the side.

1. Blue lights flash on the outside wall of a building and the camera flies into a room where Philippe Nahon, the butcher from Noé's Seul contre tous (1998), is sitting naked on a bed. He's regaling another man with his crime: 'I slept with my daughter. She was so cute.'

2. They're distracted by sirens arriving at the club downstairs which, we're told, is called the Rectum. A man, Marcus, is wheeled out on a stretcher, his shoulder strapped up. Another man, Pierre, comes out with the police; he's told he'll likely get 10 years in jail for what he did.

3. Marcus and Pierre enter 'felching fuck club' the Rectum looking for a man called Tenia, a type of tapeworm. Various acts are being performed in the club, including blow jobs, beatings, anal sex and fisting, which the two men are asked to participate in. Marcus finds someone who may be Tenia and attacks him with a bottle; Tenia throws Marcus to the ground and breaks his arm. Pierre grabs a fire extinguisher and beats Tenia's head to pulp.

4. Marcus is driving a taxi to the area where the Rectum is supposed to be; when Pierre tries to leave in the cab, Marcus smashes the car's windows. Pierre is screaming insults at Marcus, saying he must think of Alex in hospital.

5. Marcus throws a cab driver out of his taxi.

6. Pierre and Marcus are interrogating prostitutes in the company of two hoods; Marcus attacks a transsexual prostitute who admits he saw what happened: the man they want is called Tenia, and can be found in the Rectum.

7. Pierre is in a daze in the back of a police van, being interrogated. In the street he and Marcus are accosted by two local gangsters who say they will help them get revenge.

8. Coming out of an apartment block, Pierre and Marcus see a woman, Alex, being lifted into an ambulance on a stretcher. Her face is a bloody mess.

9. Alex exits the apartment block and tries to hail a taxi; she's advised to use the underpass to cross the road. It's here she is raped in a drawn-out scene, described below.

10. Marcus is making fun of Pierre at the party; with two women they go into a bathroom, where Marcus takes some coke and kisses the women. Alex is with a pregnant woman friend, telling her it's a special day. Marcus is obviously off his face and Alex tells him she wants to leave.

11. It becomes clear Pierre is Alex's ex; on the way to the party, on the Metro with Alex and Marcus, Pierre tries to get the couple to describe their sex life.

12. Alex and Marcus are shown in bed; Alex tells Marcus she dreamt of a red tunnel split in two. She tells Marcus her period is late but he says he would be pleased if she was pregnant. They play around together (Marcus puts Etienne Daho's cover of Edith Piaf's Mon manège à moi on the stereo) and Marcus tells Alex he wants to fuck her arse. He goes to buy a bottle before the party, she takes a shower and then a pregnancy test. Her reaction implies it is positive.

13. The final scene shows her lying in the gardens outside the flat, where children are playing in a sprinkler's spray.

THE FILM Despite a grudging admiration for Seul contre tous, I avoided Irreversible when it first came out in the cinema. I succumbed to review a special DVD edition for Little White Lies magazine but continue to be perplexed by the popularity of this movie: why would you want it in your home?

Irreversible answers a simple question: how do you end a rape drama on a happy note? Tell it backwards. Noé is a virtuoso technician and Irreversible shows off his talents to their full, though the film is not exactly backwards, rather its scenes are shown in reverse order. How seriously, though, do you take a film involving a search for a character named after a tapeworm in a place called the Rectum?

The film's politics are defiantly unreconstructed: 'Blood calls for vengeance,' two gangsters say. 'This is a man's business.' Sam Peckinpah examines a man's quest for revenge when the character's wife is raped in Straw Dogs (1971); Noé's associates Despentes and Trinh Thi posit an equally bloody female response in Baise-Moi.

Here, it is Pierre who boils over and smashes Tenia's head to pieces. Pierre has tried to hold Marcus back: Marcus goads Pierre over his apparently asexual life since Alex left him - is he gay? Homophobia is rife throughout the film; when we do see gay men, in the Rectum, they are extreme caricatures (none tries to stop Pierre killing Tenia, there is even some applause).

To Pierre, Marcus is an animal; this, it turns out, is why Alex is drawn to the latter. Pierre could be a typically neurotic, if uncharacteristically explicit, Woody Allen character; he tells a self-deprecating story how the one time Alex cried out during sex she had banged her head on some furniture. When Pierre quizzes the couple on their sex life, Alex says Pierre was too considerate with her, an altruist, she wants a man who takes his pleasure with her (as, Noé could be saying, the rapist does).

Tenia, Alex's rapist, is encountered with a transsexual; during his assault Tenia makes clear that he wouldn't normally fuck a woman. He berates Alex for being rich - she has dressed up for the party - and punishes her for being beautiful. (We have no idea what she or Marcus does, though Pierre is mocked for being a philosophy teacher, whether literally or not is unclear.)

If the film's moral is stated at the end - ie the beginning - it perhaps lies in Nahon's butcher's philosophy: 'Gotta fight, gotta live. Go on fighting, go on living.' At the beginning - the end - Noé underlines the possibility of Alex's pregnancy by twice showing a poster for 2001: A Space Odyssey featuring a floating foetus. The film closes with a scene of picture-perfect tranquility. It is said Noé used a 27 hertz tone in the film's soundtrack to induce nausea in viewers (the score is by Daft Punk's Thomas Bangalter). At the end, you may well feel sick.

KEY SCENE Chapter 10, 42:54 Alex walks down the underpass and sees a couple fighting. The man beats the woman and, when Alex passes, he grabs her. He pulls a knife on her and forces her to the ground. He holds her mouth shut and anally rapes her while all the time spouting threats and obscenities. (In case we don't get the point, Noé added a CGI penis to the assailant in post-production.) The scene lasts some time; when he finishes Alex tries to crawl away but he begins to kick her head. He then grabs her, punches her many times and pummels her face into the ground.

FURTHER VIEWING Noé's new film, Enter the Void, opens this Friday, 24 September, and includes a sex scene from inside the vagina, reminiscent of Nic Roeg's dire Puffball (2007). Noé is said to be working on an 'erotic love' movie next.

THE QUOTE 'Time destroys everything' - End caption

BONUS CURIO Noé collects posters for Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is presumably where the image used near the end of Irreversible comes from.

The gasman cometh: a belated introduction

In the coldest part of last winter, when it was snowing, the boiler in my flat died. When the repairman came to replace it, I went out for part of the day to avoid the noise and disruption. On my return, the job had been completed and he was eager to be on his way.

Home early, with little to do, I thought I may as well watch a DVD, but then noticed that my various stacks of films had been moved: some discs were gone. I could see that Sex and Lucía was missing, but couldn't work out what the others might be. I rang the boilerman and asked if he happened to have seen any of my DVDs, but could hardly accuse him of theft.

It was clear that the films he'd taken all featured fairly strong sex - I've since discovered the others included Baise-Moi and Catherine Breillat's Anatomy of Hell. It got me thinking about how sex on mainstream DVD has become more explicit, and how we're more likely to have these films in our homes. HMV, for instance, will group many of these, often art-house, films together on its display shelves, some for as little as £3. The message would seem to be, you may not be a porn buyer, but here's something fairly strong, if not hardcore, that's acceptable to take home.

At university, I did a dissertation on obscenity law, notably in cinema, and I am interested in how attitudes have changed since the big arguments over censorship, such as the controversies over the book of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1960) or the film Last Tango in Paris (1972). Outrage is as big a sell as ever, but now the film certificates ('strong real sex') seem as much a part of the marketing.

The films here did not all cause controversy, nor were that many censored, but they are part of the process that allows us to freely buy DVDs featuring hardcore sex (Baise-Moi) or genital mutilation (Antichrist) on the high street and watch them at home. The films I've chosen are all available on DVD (details refer to UK editions for the most part) and these posts are the building blocks to a longer essay I want to write, updating my original thesis.

NB There be spoilers throughout!

The usual note: if any picture infringes your copyright, please let me know and I'll remove it immediately.

Baise-Moi: Grrls with guns

DIRECTED BY Virginie Despentes, Coralie Trinh Thi, 2000
STARRING Karen Lancaume as Karen Bach (Nadine), Raffaëla Anderson (Manu)
CERTIFICATION 18: Frequent/very strong language, sex/nudity and violence. Some hard drugs use
RUN TIME 73 mins approx, Universal
LANGUAGE French

COVER QUOTE 'The most extreme thriller you'll ever see legally' - Uncut

WHY YOU SHOULD WATCH IT A censor's worst nightmare: sex and violence. Based on a 1994 novel by Virginie Despentes, who worked as a prostitute after she was raped aged 17; co-director Coralie Trinh Thi was a porn actress, as were the film's two stars.

THE PLOT Manu and a friend are picked up by three men and raped in a warehouse; later she fights with her brother and shoots him dead. Nadine, a prostitute, falls out with her flatmate and apparently kills her; Nadine goes to join her fixer friend Vincent but sees him shot and killed. Manu and Nadine run into each other by chance and agree to drive to Paris together; Manu forces Nadine at gunpoint to take them to the coast.

In the morning they agree to join forces and embark on an unpremeditated killing spree. Their targets include: a woman at a cash till who they mug; a man (who they kick to death) who picks them up but refuses to have sex without a condom; two policemen, and the entire clientele of a 'fuck club'. They stay in hotels and pull random men for sex while a major hunt is underway for them. At a roadside café, Manu is killed; Nadine rescues her body and sets fire to it. The next morning Nadine intends to kill herself but is caught by the police.

THE FILM The theft by a boiler repairman (that's not a euphemism) of a few of my DVDs more than a year ago was the partial inspiration for this blog. I immediately spotted that one of the films he had taken was Julio Medem's excellent Sex and Lucía, but it was only recently that I realised another of the DVDs he lifted was Baise-Moi, and this became the catalyst for me to finally get writing.

There's a lot in Baise-Moi to get worked up about: the rape, the mindless violence, the close-up shots of genitalia... But it's not as offensive as Gaspar Noé's Irreversible, say, and in its madcap, freewheeling way, is almost likeable. Widely portrayed as Thelma and Louise with guns - and full-on sex, and drink, and drugs, and no morality, and little sense of its own structure - it's hard to be truly offended by this film. That's not to say you won't be shocked.

Baise-Moi isn't the first time hardcore actors have been cast in a 'mainstream' (in the sense that dsitributors hoped it would be shown in general city-centre or, at least, art-house, cinemas) film: Catherine Breillat cast Rocco Siffredi in Romance (1999), for instance, and has used him since; Steven Soderbergh had Sasha Grey as the lead in his strangely asexual 2009 movie, The Girlfriend Experience. But here, the main artistic core of the movie seems to have been taken over by practioners from the porn industry: Trinh Thi, Lancaume, Anderson... What seemed to inflame matters further was that they were all women. These girls were doing it for themselves.

One neat little gag (the only one) comes when Nadine recognises Manu from porn films. Manu assumes that Nadine must have been forced to watch them with a boyfriend but, as we're shown early in the film, Nadine is happy to enjoy them on her own. (The glimpse we see implies that she watches violent porn.)

When Nadine visits a client, the film playing in his room, which she's more interested in than his promise to make her come, is Gaspar Noé's Seul Contre Tous (1998). Noé is thanked at the end of the film and his filmic philosophy serves as some sort of inspiration for Baise-Moi: his is an almost nihilist cinema of style over substance, despair over hope, degradation over ambition and shock over awe. One clip Despentes and Trinh Thi show from Seul Contre Tous exemplifies the level all three directors, including Noé, are working at: his butcher hero slicing a sausage.

At one moment in Baise-Moi, Manu kills a man who crudely tries to pick her up in the street but the violence is not simply meted out to men who cross the line. Women are dispatched with even less care as there is no reason to kill them; 'Where are the lines?' complains Manu, mourning the James Bond aspect of murder we've all become inured to in big-screen action movies. 'People are dying, the dialogue has to be up to it.'

In one scene Nadine poses like Luc Besson's Nikita with the latest addition to her artillery, CD Walkman incongruously hooked in her pants. (Nor do the men always get what's coming to them: a man who they've brought back for a foursome with his friend is simply told to leave their room, and does so. Another man, though, who tries to chat Nadine up with a gun to his head, may think he's worked his charm but is in for a surprise.)

Baise-Moi is not a very good film (Anderson tries too hard, though Lancaume is a strong, natural presence) but, you'll have gathered, I have a soft spot for it. When it was attacked as pornography, its directors and stars defended it by saying it was not meant to turn viewers on, a naturally reductive argument that's often used with deeply sexual material.

While the two leads of 9 Songs are actors and were hired for that reason, there's an emotional honesty there that lifts it above pornography; Baise-Moi is adrenalised caper, which its creators likened to comics, so the inclusion of graphic sex is questionable, if defensible. Whether any of its scenes work on the level of arousal, is up to you.

KEY SCENES Chapter 6, 33:50 Nadine and Manu decide to get wasted and pull two men in a bar. They go up to their room for sex; the women watch each other critically, admiringly. When one of the men says he'd like to see the women go down each other he's thrown out.

Chapter 8, 50:42 At a seaside hotel, Nadine pulls the desk clerk, they masturbate in front of each other before she gives him a blow job. Meanwhile, Manu heads out on the town and meets a man in a bar; in what's a favourite move, she pulls out the crotch of her tights and they have sex.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT Baise-Moi was given a 16 rating in France on its release but the courts overthrew this, following a campaign largely instigated by right-wing pressure group Promouvoir. An initial ban, the first of its kind for 28 years in the country, was rescinded and replaced with an X certificate, restricting the film to being screened in porn cinemas. A campaign that included Claire Denis and Jean-Luc Godard saw the 18 certificate reintroduced and the film could finally be shown in salles.

Elsewhere in the world, its route to public screening was even more fraught: the film was pulled from screens in Australia after it had been showing for a month provoking a run on art-house cinemas (police were even called to one venue in Sydney) and banned in some 22 other countries. In Britain, Baise-Moi was awarded an 18 certificate following 10 seconds of cuts in the rape scene; a further 12 seconds were cut for the video release of a gun being inserted into a man's anus before being fired.

Lancaume killed herself in 2005, a week after her 32nd birthday.

KEY QUOTE 'Weird we should meet like that, huh?' - Manu

BONUS CURIO Advertising posters for the film were banned by London Underground for fear of upsetting French tourists: the title, Baise-Moi, translates as 'Fuck me'. (Some territories have it as the extremely unpleasant, 'Rape Me'.)