Irreversible

By PETER CALDER

French filmmaker Gaspar Noe - this year's enfant terrible of European cinema - is unfazed that his film, Irreversible, was programmed here in a festival of bad taste, B-grade and below.

"I'm not worried by that at all," he says, speaking from his Paris apartment. "I don't mind being in an underground or extreme cinema festival, next to Cannibal Holocaust or something like that. That's the kind of movie I go to see mostly anyway."

There's a better-than-even chance he has his Gallic tongue planted firmly in his cheek as he says so. Even in a short conversation, the 40-year-old Argentine-born Frenchman reveals himself as a cineaste of wide knowledge.

And he is no stranger to shock. His debut feature, I Stand Alone, an exploration inside the head of a psychotic, racist Paris butcher, was also deeply disturbing, but it won the Critics' Week Award at Cannes in 1998.

Irreversible was in competition at Cannes last year and unlike the laughably inept Baise-Moi, which caused all the fuss last year, it displays an extraordinary technical assurance

Its 12 scenes consist of 12 unedited shots through a camera executing dizzying tilts and swoops or, occasionally, sitting pitilessly still.

But the film is more notable for its content than its form: a brutal and brutally explicit revenge drama presented in reverse chronological order, it shows the aftermath (before the event) of an appalling rape.

Two scenes have excited controversy worldwide and provoked attempts to have its screening stopped here: a savage, fatal beating near the beginning (of a man who is not the rapist, the most alert will notice) and the rape itself, an almost unbearable nine-minute shot at the movie's mid-point, filmed with a stationary camera and utterly devoid of manipulative prurience.

It is not the first movie to tell its story backward: Christopher Nolan's Memento in 2001 used the device to make an intricate psychological thriller, and the 1983 film version of Harold Pinter's Betrayal used it to illuminate an an act of infidelity.

But in both those films, it felt like a tricksy gimmick, a stylistic raison d'etre. Irreversible's narrative line lends the reverse telling a visceral emotional wallop because the later scenes - in which real-life partners Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel kiss and canoodle - are overcast with the sickening knowledge of what will come "after".

Thus a simple payback tale becomes a cri de coeur against a world in which the good so often suffer and evil goes unpunished. Its existential insights are scarcely profound but the film is indisputably more than the sum of its parts.

The film has been greeted by anguish wherever it has played and has been denounced and defended in roughly equal measure.

So it is safe to say that Noe is not surprised by criticism, though he is more than a little shocked at moves to stop the film screening here.

"Can't you just put them in a boat and send them to another country?" he asks of the Society for the Promotion of Community Standards, which led the charge against two films in the Becks Incredible Film Festival.

The film's opponents here would probably not object to being described as moral conservatives but Noe says the harshest criticism he has received abroad has been from film critics.

"The French film critics at Cannes were angry I think because they did not want me to represent their flag. I find the most opposition comes from heterosexual men rather than gays and women.

"And that's easy to understand. In the rape scene a woman is victimised and the woman is the character the audience identifies with during the movie.

"So men who don't like being in the head of a victimised woman suddenly find themselves in a position they don't like. Women have less problem identifying with it than men have, especially dominant men."

In any case, he says people who don't like the movie don't have to see it. "You're not going out there to get enemies. You are just making the movie you like, and if some people dislike it that's their problem, not yours.

"I know some people who have been close to this kind of situation - there has been a murder or a rape in their family - they were not that shocked.

"It is mainly those people who reject the violence in humankind. They are shocked because they would like to deny the world in this movie but unfortunately it is not like that."

And it is plainly not lost on him that controversy is good for business. He chose the most hostile reviews to plaster across the covers of the French DVD release. His favourite was the judgment of Le Figaro that the film is "one small step for cinema, a giant leap for barbarism".

"I am honoured by it," he says. "The more people who hate you the more you end up feeling you are important. When people thrash you it's good for publicity.

"If people say it's the worst film they have ever seen or it should be banned, then the movie has provoked a strong reaction. That means it is strong because you don't have a strong reaction to things that are weak."

* Irreversible is due to be screened in the Becks Incredible Film Fest at the Civic today, at 4.10pm.