Irreversible by Tim Palmer (review)

This is an illuminating and highly original study of one of contemporary French cinema's most uncompromising and provocative films (Irréversible, dir. by Gaspar Noé, 2002). In line with the remit of 'Controversies', the book offers an in-depth account of Irréversible's production and distribution history, as well as a brief overview of the film's critical reception in France, North America, and Europe. However, where other titles in the series have been criticized for rehearsing overly familiar debates at the expense of in-depth critical engagement (see John Semley, 'Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, The Passion of the Christ, A Clockwork Orange, Straw Dogs', Cinéaste, 38 (2012), 75–77), Tim Palmer's book limits the discussion of the film's reception history — including its legacy in renewing debates about and informing approaches to classification and censorship — to a comparatively brief chapter of only nine and a half pages. A decision has clearly been taken here to expand instead on the film's relationship with the broader ecosystem of contemporary French media, to permit for more nuanced formal readings of the film's structural and narrative design, and to explore its status as a rogue star vehicle. In this regard, the book is a particularly valuable resource for students and scholars of cinema, and it forms an excellent companion piece to Palmer's 2011 monograph Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press). Palmer begins by discussing his own personal trajectory of thinking about and alongside Irréversible, making the case for the film as both a 'tissue of reworked citations, a hard-to-classify mutant production' and a 'quintessentially French' film embodying many of the contradictions that have come to define French cinema since the 1990s (pp. xiv and xiii). He draws detailed attention to the shaping industrial practices and cultural contexts, which have sometimes been overlooked in the film's scholarly history. So doing, the book produces a useful counter-perspective to more ingrained accounts of both the film and the director as exceptions or limit-cases within French cinema. Alongside the more familiar image of Noé as dissident auteur influenced by an eclectic mix of Hollywood and avant-garde cinema traditions, Palmer constructs a convincing portrait of the director as 'a representative case of working his way up through the French industrial ranks systematically' and as a 'good citizen of the contemporary French film State' (p. 17). Similarly, while the book acknowledges the film's often inflammatory gender, sexual, and racial politics, it also attends to the more frequently overlooked moments of romance and tenderness, as they are given expression through the bodies of its star performers, Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel. In a highly original and convincing sub-argument, Palmer reads the film's trajectory from destruction to bliss against the grain as working within, while reinventing classical Hollywood romantic 'comedies of remarriage' (p. 99). Ultimately, this is where the book comes into its own: Palmer confirms the value of reading onscreen bodies in all of their signifying complexity. Although the book might be accused of failing to explore fully the value and significance of the controversies that it has generated, it is a welcome first full-length study of this notoriously divisive and yet 'fascinatingly considered' film (p. 91).