The film's distilled brutality is hard to take and yet, like pornography, stirs one at some level. In another review here a commentator notes that his copy of the DVD deletes the violence in the S&M club. Too bad. One of the ironies of the story is contained in that scene: Vincent Cassel's character, mad for revenge, is quickly brought down and the vengeance taker becomes instead the victim's former lover who has been desparately trying to keep rein on his companion's rage and has followed Cassel's character to the pit to keep him from adding disaster to tragedy. The film follows the "backwards" chronology a la "Memento." Philospophical pretensions aside, this method of storytelling has it's limits and will become tiresome one day soon. But with the top-notch talent we have here one's interest is naturally engaged: Why, how, what caused what we just saw and we follow the string of the plot, back and back. But the subtleties of character and plot development are not possible as in traditional cinematic storytelling. The method keeps the story, however powerful, at the level of melodrama. Note: The opening scene with two old men on a bed must be racked up, I guess, to the French capacity for mystifying bits of business whose whose relevance to story is impenetrably obscure. Jim Smith---
Review of Irreversible
