Trailer
Plot summary
In a small Paris apartment, a man called the Butcher sits on a bed with a friend and explains that he went to prison for sleeping with his daughter, then waves off the noise from outside. The apartment looks out on a club called Rectum, a gay BDSM venue where police are carrying an injured man away on a stretcher. Marcus and Pierre have been searching the same club for a man known as Le Ténia. Marcus questions the patrons, and some of them ask him for sexual acts instead of answering. Pierre follows him through the rooms as he keeps asking.
Cast
- Layde Hellalas Layde (as Hellal)
- Dominique Natoas Commissaire (as Nato)
- Michel Fescheas Chauffeur Taxi (as Fesche)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Irreversible (2002)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- An extremely low-frequency 27 Hz tone — the frequency police use to stop riots — was added to the club music of Thomas Bangalter's score to make audiences feel nauseous and anxious; it is felt rather than consciously heard.
- Around 200 people walked out of the Cannes screening of the film, and emergency services gave oxygen to twenty who had fainted during it; Vincent Cassel said his brother stood up mid-screening and shouted expletives at Gaspar Noé.
- Gaspar Noé first asked Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel to star in the project that became Love, but they refused its explicit sex scenes; he then pitched a "rape-revenge movie backward," and they agreed.
- Irréversible is built from about a dozen apparently unbroken shots melded from hundreds, among them the infamous nine-minute rape scene, portrayed in a single, unbroken shot.
SPOILER
The penis in the rape scene was added with computer-generated imagery in post-production, as was the fire extinguisher attack in which Pierre crushes a man's skull, after footage shot with a latex dummy proved unconvincing.- The script for Irréversible ran only three pages, about a quarter-page for each of its twelve scenes, and none of the scenes had written dialogue.
- Yves Saint Laurent made ten copies of the green silk dress Monica Bellucci wears in the film, because a copy was destroyed during every take of the rape scene.
- Irréversible has also been associated with the New French Extremity movement, and director Damien Chazelle credits its club scene as an influence on his film Babylon.
