Why link an arty exploitation picture about rape, murder, and revenge with a sober adaptation of Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy, a 1960s German play about the failure of the Vatican to save Jewish lives during the Holocaust? One reason is to point out a critical difference between them. In Irreversible Gaspar Noe elects to show us everything—two faces being smashed to bloody messes, the heroine being raped and beaten for an agonizing ten minutes—while in Amen. (which played last week at the Music Box) Costa-Gavras shows his hero Kurt Gerstein (Ulrich Tukur), a newly commissioned SS lieutenant with a conscience, watching the gassing of Jews through a peephole with other officers but refuses to show us any part of what Gerstein sees.
I’ve called Noe’s previous feature, I Stand Alone (1998), a masterpiece, and I’m not about to take that back. Yet I’m inclined to regard it as an accidental masterpiece—a masterpiece despite the declared intentions of its author, who wanted to call the picture France and whose reason for wanting to take us into the mind of a violent racist butcher who has sex with his mentally challenged daughter appears to be the same reason he wants us to witness murder and rape at such length and in such painful detail in Irreversible. These reasons are set down fairly succinctly, if not always clearly, in Irreversible‘s press book:
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“Because time destroys everything “Because some acts are irreparable “Because man is an animal “Because the desire for vengeance is a natural impulse “Because most crimes remain unpunished “Because the loss of a loved one destroys like lightning “Because love is the source of life “Because all history is written in sperm and blood “Because in a good world “Because premonitions do not alter the course of events “Because time reveals everything “The best and the worst.”
Here we enter another realm of confusion. The film begins with its supposedly backward credits and a brief appearance by Philippe Nahon, the butcher of I Stand Alone (also the focus of Noe’s first film, Carne)—brought back like a presiding philosopher king to inform us and a friend of his that “time destroys everything.” We then see the arrest for murder of the two male leads, the heroine’s current and former lovers (Cassel and Albert Dupontel), in a gay S and M club called the Rectum, the cops spouting homophobic invective at them as they’re taken away. But the camera gyrates so wildly throughout this and the next few sequences that even though we get to witness the preceding violence, we have only a blurry sense of who the victim is.
In the immediate aftermath of the May 1968 student riots in France, when critics at Cahiers du Cinema were attempting to hammer out new models for political filmmaking, the popular leftist but commercial films of Costa-Gavras were singled out as bad models. Even when they were grudgingly defended, they were valued mainly as instructive errors. “It is not possible,” wrote Jean-Louis Comolli in 1970, “in the name of theoretical purity or rigor, simply to dismiss as totally worthless the mass of films for which The Confession and Z might (and do) serve as models. These films are certainly not the site of any cinematographic work, any signifying practice capable of subverting the aesthetic-cultural norms of the dominant ideology; but for that very reason they stand at the center of the ideological stage and participate massively in the general ideological confusion, playing the part [for] a great many spectators and virtually all the critics of authentically political films.” By contrast, intellectual critics in the U.S. such as Pauline Kael were defending these Costa-Gavras films about political assassination (Z) and the Stalin show trials (The Confession) with fewer compunctions, though even Kael admitted to misgivings: “The techniques of melodrama are not those of art,” she wrote in her review of Z—a rather sweeping claim that would also seem to rule out Hamlet and favorites of hers such as The Godfather—”but if we accept them when they’re used on trivial, fabricated stories (robberies, spy rings, etc.) merely to excite us, how can we reject them when the filmmakers attempt to use them to expose social evils and to dramatize political issues?”
But let me bring another voice into the discussion, that of German film critic Olaf Moller. When I recently mentioned in passing in an E-mail that I was writing about Amen. and Irreversible together, he wrote back that he found this juxtaposition interesting albeit “somewhat sickening, but so is cinema’s reality right now.” He went on to tell me that he preferred Irreversible, explaining his dislike of Amen. by saying, “I have to admit that, at least for me, the excess of opinion and Betroffenheit (there is, judging by my dictionary, no English equivalent: it means something like embarrassed, awkward, seriously guilt-ridden silence) is far worse than Noe’s formalist lizard-choking: At least there’s something like meaning in Noe’s style, albeit a politically, well, less desirable one….Whereas CG’s howling is nothing [but] bourgeois self-congratulation, jerking off to a feeling of moral superiority.”
Directed and written by Gaspar Noe
With Monica Bellucci, Vincent Cassel, Albert Dupontel, Jo Prestia, and Philippe Nahon
Amen. ** (Worth seeing)
Directed by Costa-Gavras
Written by Costa-Gavras and Jean-Claude Grumberg
With Ulrich Tukur, Mathieu Kassovitz, Ulrich Muhe, Michel Duchaussoy, and Fontana Ion Caramitru.
