REVIEW (posted 3/6/03)

To call writer-director Gaspar Noé blunt is a bit of an understatement. An in-your-face style marks everything he does-the press kit for this film (his second feature), for example, kicks off with an epigrammatic mini-manifesto that's printed in all capital letters, using a bold, blocky typeface (the same that the film's poster is in). A very definite fellow, this Noé. You might be the sort of person to turn away from violence, but not him. This movie is shot in a sequence of what seem to be unbroken takes, and in an early scene — which is actually the end of the story Noé is telling, thus sort of contradicting his title-a pair of men seeking revenge for a horrible crime run riot in a gay sex club, and when they think they've found the guilty party, one of them smashes the guy's face off — and I mean literally smashes the guy's face off — with a fire extinguisher.

Later — and earlier, as it were, since the story is being told backward — we see the crime that motivated this horrific and horribly botched act of revenge — a brutal anal rape and beating that some have cited as being nine minutes long, and others have timed at eleven minutes. Fool that I am, I left my stopwatch at home when I saw the movie, but the scene is excruciating to sit through, and as far as I'm concerned, the dedication and competence of Monica Bellucci, who plays the victim, can never be questioned again. In the next scene, Bellucci is presented in a fashion that most of her male following will find more palatable — at a party in a barely-there dress, nipples standing at attention, getting ticked at the crass behavior of her boyfriend, which will soon compel her to leave and meet a fate maybe worse than death.

And here you may be getting the idea that Noé is more than just blunt — that he kind of gets off on rubbing your face in this awfulness, that by presenting Bellucci in near-lust-object mode after subjecting her character to an awful desecration he's pointing the finger at his audience in a way they haven't earned. But Noé has still more up his sleeve, and his final message (the pretentious intimations of the cosmic in the film's last shot aside) is a bracingly humane one, which is that actions have consequences, and that you should be really careful of the way you treat people you profess to care about. Yes, Noé's methods are unorthodox, to say the least. But this confrontationalist is a moviemaker worth confronting, if you've got the stomach for it.

— Glenn Kenny

Told in a reverse chronological narrative, the latest from French filmmaker Gaspar Noé (he directed the provocative I Stand Alone) is a raw drama about an enraged man (Brotherhood of the Wolf's Vincent Cassel) seeking vengeance after his girlfriend (Monica Bellucci, of Malena) is brutally raped.

The Bottom Line: This looks to be an important film, but be prepared for extremely graphic violence. (Lions Gate)