The conventional-wisdom answer is that these works are the products - or at least the reflections - of a sexually saturated culture. They're tackling subjects that most other filmmakers are afraid to even go near. Compare "Irreversible" and "Ken Park" to the slick and hollow representations of sexuality that passed for being "edgy" this year - Roger Avary's college campus roundelay-cum-Abercrombie and Fitch catalog "The Rules of Attraction," the Masterpiece Theater vision of bisexuality offered by "Frida," the sweaty-sex-with-our-clothes-kept-on trysts of "8 Mile" and "Gangs of New York" - and you begin to see how essential artists such as Noe and Clark and Lachman are.
Granted, the messages the filmmakers are sending are often contradictory ones.īut if this is a disturbing trend, then it is also disturbing in the best sense of that word - disturbing our preconceived notions of what constitutes art, and forcing us to consider and question our own responses to graphic images on the screen. Yes, the actors in them seem to have been required to give up too much of themselves for the camera's consumption. Certainly, they raise questions - particularly about whether or not art must remain "decent" in order to be effective - that can't be sidestepped. They are too well-made, too challenging, too unsettling to be ignored. The tendency for many critics and moviegoers is to reject these works - to argue that the directors are depraved, and that they are taking advantage of their performers. By the end of those 10 minutes, the audience is pretty much numb.ĭoes "Irreversible," as some critics have charged, go too far? Does the film -which includes a scene in a gay sex club, where the extras appear to really be having sex, and another scene in which a man repeatedly bashes the head of another man with a fire extinguisher, until his skin is falling off his face - cross the line into exploitation? The blood looks real the violence looks real Bellucci's physical and emotional journey - first resistant, then slowly, horribly defeated - looks real. The hand-held camera moves with the subjects, staying close to their bodies. Soon the pimp turns his wrath on Alex, knocking her violently to the ground, shouting expletives at her.
The sequence unfolds in one uninterrupted, 10-minute take: Bellucci's Alex enters a pedestrian tunnel in Paris, where she stumbles upon a fight between a pimp (Prestia) and a transsexual prostitute. How far they go makes "Irreversible" among the most disturbing movies in recent memory - a film so explicit that many will regard it as pornography.
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