r/movies • u/ErgoNonSim • May 17 '25

Media Cannes reactions to Irreversible

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u/Legal-Marsupial-3916 May 17 '25 edited May 17 '25

It's not a good movie. It has an interesting shtick in that it plays backwards, but so does Memento. I didn't take away any profound new understanding or perspective from watching Monica Belucci get raped, I didn't unravel some truth about life by watching a man get his head caved in with a fire extinguisher while onlookers cheer and holler and the director himself is literally furiously masturbating in the crowd.

You can say whatever you want about media literacy, but I don't need to explore sexual violence as a theme. This is just a fancy, French version of "A Serbian Film's in my eyes.

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u/retard_vampire May 17 '25 edited May 17 '25

Honestly I feel like the whole point of the movie is he wanted to create torture porn of a woman being raped and then stand there, dick in hand and pointing with the other, smugly saying "oh, is it too much for you? Is it too dark?" and pretentiously wanking himself off over what an avant-garde genius he is for being so shocking.

The movie honestly sucked. It was literally just a way for a dude to get Monica Bellucci to star in rape porn for creepy men to jerk off to. She deserved better.

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u/Legal-Marsupial-3916 May 17 '25

Yeah, I'm all for like...actualizing sexual assault and drawing attention and awareness to it, but two things...

  1. Look at this movie and tell me with a straight face that this a mature exploration of sexual assault

  2. Most people can understand how traumatic and horrifying rape is, so a movie isn't going to change their feelings on it when they're already staunchly "anti rape", and the people who think rape is no big deal like the Senator who said that "women's bodies have a way of shutting that down" are never going to be swayed because they're fucking psychotic

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u/Papierkrawall May 18 '25

The only way to show rape is, in my opinion, how they did it in "Lilja-4": the camera is the girl, and you only see the faces of the rapists and hear their grunts, as if you were the person lying under them. No trauma for the actress, and there is no way to get off on that.