Don't look back: Irréversible

Doubling back to revisit Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible (2002) for the first time since its initial release, after having recently endured Enter the Void, the New French Extremist’s most recent work, offered diminishing returns with regards to the film’s overall sleaze-bag sensationalism while its notorious mid-point rape scene remains genuinely unbearable, which is some sort of accomplishment. Moving chronologically backwards through its deceptively simple urban Straw Dogs revenge narrative, Irréversible begins in what appears to be a dingy flop house where a mostly naked, daughter-molesting ex-con laments how “time destroys all things,” thus announcing the theme from the outset, lest we fail to grasp it on our own. (In any event, the film ends with this dictum appearing as a closing title card. All in caps. Noé is nothing if not thorough.) From here we hit a gay sex club called the Rectum, a Halloween-lit cavernous labyrinth of cock-sucking and flagellation, and rise to our first climax in which Pierre (Albert Dupontel) smashes a degenerate’s face to a pulp before a handful of cheerfully masturbating spectators, among them the director himself. Take that as you will.

From here we jump back to find Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and Pierre on their way to said face-obliteration, attacking and insulting both a Chinese cabbie and hermaphrodite hooker along the way. “Off to the Rectum!” shouts Cassel, clearly instructed to repeat the word “rectum” as often as possible. (It is fun to say, I suppose, and, like the film's title, has the added benefit of requiring no translation into English.) After this, which is to say before, Marcus’ unspeakably lovely girlfriend Alex (Monica Bellucci) is anally assaulted and viciously beaten for eight unblinking minutes in a red-painted underpass—yet another rectal tunnel! After this, presuming we’re still watching, we learn why Alex took the tunnel, listen to a long, banal, repetitive conversation about sexual pleasure on the métro, and discover a secret Alex has been keeping that makes her fate that much more appalling and tragic.

Time diminishes shock value. Irréversible’s structure is cleanly aligned to its themes of entropy and inescapable doom, though, seeing the film again after all these years, its effect-before-cause formalism strikes me as little more than a nihilist-sadist pulp thriller version of Jeopardy!: answer first, question second. This is mostly because once you get the gist of Noé’s concept and adjust your senses to the vertigo-inducing camera work there’s little left to explore and so very much to deplore. The actors are obviously of a higher caliber than those in Enter the Void, but they have little to say (the dialogue is blather) and not much to do besides endure ghastly torment or exact medieval violence. I don’t think I’ll be reversing through this one again.

Burning trails, driving under the influence, with man and beast and man-beasts: new books from Sam Shepard and Jim Harrison

When I was a teenager I’d hop in my father’s rattling old work van, or later on the used Jetta he and my mother had helped me buy, and kill hours just driving along back roads alone, around Olds, Cochrane, and Black Diamond, or across the foothills toward Dead Man’s Flats and Canmore. It was a form of escape, the forging of a connection with a landscape, and a way to figure out how to write. My mind was able to stretch out on these short treks, and the stubborn words I sought with little fortune in my parents’ house or in the high school hallways where I’d hide while ditching class would finally emerge, often just a few a time, and I would carefully write them out with my right hand while steering with my left. Driving around aimlessly in rural areas with pen and pad by my side seemed like a magic method for coming up with ideas, and my suspicions seemed confirmed when I’d read about how Sam Shepard, whose plays kind of blew my mind at an early age, was supposed to have done the same thing.

Sam Shepard

Times have changed, I’ve gotten a little more disciplined about working at a table, and I don’t even own a car these days, but, if the many brief stories, poems and fragmentary prose collected in Day Out of Days (Knopf, $32) are any indication, it seems Shepard, now in his 60s, still acting, still writing, has kept up the habit of driving all over the place, without destination, and writing, a sort of endless existential commute to work. (Though he portrayed US Air Force Major General Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff, Shepard is to this day famously uncomfortable with airplanes, and thus drives himself to all his filming locations. His insistence on roadways over airways was endearingly transferred to the protagonist of the Shepard-scripted Paris, Texas.) Several pieces in Day Out of Days could be attributed to the same narrator, someone most often found behind the wheel of a truck on a road somewhere in North America, someone who apparently is and isn’t Sam Shepard, who shares Shepard’s occupation, age and Midwestern roots, if not his exact experiences or sensibility. An aging actor becomes so disinterested in his work that he can’t even remember which movie he’s working on. A man returns to his hometown many years after fleeing and becoming famous and finds another man who never left and still resents him. A traveler stops in a motel during a blizzard and meets an emotionally distraught woman who claims to be a lover from his days in New York in the 1960s. Ghosts from this narrator’s past keep materializing, generating anxiety, and interrogating his sense of identity. The result is often funny, and sometimes spooky.

Not as spooky, perhaps, as a series of tales, dispersed throughout Day Out of Days, involving a seasoned professional assassin hired to cut off someone’s face, an activity which forces him to reconsider his vocation. Nor as spooky as the story of the nervous man who finds a head in a basket while walking along the side of a highway. The head speaks to the man, and asks him for a favour. Savage, incomprehensible violence is a recurring theme here, with characters pondering events far off in the Middle East, or closer to home, in the drowned suburbs of New Orleans. In an especially hilarious story, a man talks about floating to safety in the wake of Katrina with Chubby Checker, his bodyguard, and his beloved piano. Fantasy, memoir, and essay blend together in this absorbing, strange, and elegant collection, an ode to restlessness, stray human connections, and what genuinely open spaces we still have left to wander upon.

Tensions between urban and rural space, between movement and stasis, between solitude and togetherness, are also a key feature in Jim Harrison’s most recent collection of novellas, The Farmer’s Daughter (Anansi, $29.95), which also consumes a lot of highway mileage, covering much of the continent in just a few hundred pages. It’s a spry, sensitive, sometimes sex-crazed book, which frequently drifts into evocative reveries centering around its author’s love for nature and sport, an homage to basic instincts and refined tastes.

Sarah Anitra Holcomb comes of age in the titular tale, set in rural Montana. She’s a smart and highly literate girl, quietly lusted after by the amiable old farmer who becomes her best friend. A keen observer of nature, she witnesses numerous blood rituals that transpire in the wild, and eventually becomes familiar with similarly bestial encounters between men and women, which prompt an act of revenge. The sudden, somewhat incongruous swerve toward crime drama halfway through ‘The Farmer’s Daughter’ nearly upsets the tender tone of the whole, yet Harrison’s eye for detail keeps things balanced, his attention to animals and humans and they way they sniff each other out, negotiate their terms of survival, violate their tacit contracts, and meet with some natural form of justice.

Jim Harrison, with friend

‘Brown Dog Redux’ marks the return of Harrison’s horny Chippewa as he tries to flee Michigan social services with his stepdaughter, who, born with fetal alcohol syndrome, is to be placed in a home of disabled youngsters. Brown Dog gets dumped by a lady in Toronto before touring the prairies with an Indian rock and roll band and gradually winding up in Michigan all over again. His journey is fun, if not the most memorable of Harrison’s latest narratives—that accolade would be reserved for ‘The Games of Night.’ This final tale concerns a lycanthrope, afflicted as a boy after being bitten by a Mexican hummingbird, now living out his adult life largely in isolation so as to sequester himself from others during his monthly moonlight rampages. But our protagonist wearies of being a lone wolf, of only reading about romantic love in the poems of Ovid. He wants a girlfriend. So Harrison renovates a familiar mythology to investigate the extremes of desire, and in doing so facilitates our suspension of disbelief by simply requiring us to recognize the network of impulses dictated by the beast within all of us.

Schadenfreude and its limits: the not exactly funny, weirdly fascinating, simultaneously iconoclastic and conservative Hamlet 2

“I feel like I’ve been raped… in the face!” This is but one of many highly characteristic, uncomfortably revealing little one-liners that fire up like hot phlegm from the psychological bowels of hopelessly self-involved and dramatically disturbed high school drama teacher Dana Marschz (Steve Coogan). With a desperately unhappy, venomously unloving wife (Catherine Keener, who so rarely loves anybody), a full class of largely disinterested students aspiring to little more than lives of crime, and his entire department about to be wiped off the school curriculum, Marschz is a man reaching a major crisis point. Sorely in need of some solid therapy, he improvises his own flamboyant act of auto-analysis through writing, directing and eventually even starring in a sequel to Shakespeare’s brooding masterpiece that involves time travel, Jesus, greasers, musical numbers and some serious-as-cancer father issues.

Directed by Andrew Fleming (Dick, The In-Laws) and written by Fleming and South Park writer/producer Pam Brady, Hamlet 2 is a racy, ribald, risqué comedy out to bust any number of sentimental stereotypes and empty gestures of political correctness. The residual damage of childhood sexual abuse is here rendered as grounds for hilarity! Racial phobias in the classroom aren’t so much put to rest as capitalized as a launch pad for shamelessly exoticized teenage lust! Yet, curiously, Hamlet 2 is also one of the most deeply conventional movies you’ll see this summer. No less than mainstream feel-good movies like Pride, The Great Debaters or Mr. Holland’s Opus, one of several movies it makes fun of, Hamlet 2 is a textbook go-for-it movie, as well as a let’s-put-on-show movie, religiously observant of every last trope these subgenres imply, from the kids who learn to believe in themselves to the wildly implausible love interest to the even more implausible über-triumphant denouement. It’s entirely possible that Fleming and Brady intentionally adhered to the conventional model as a way of emphasizing the film’s seemingly incompatible let’s-offend-everybody comic sensibility, but that doesn’t make it any less tiresome to watch all the pegs fall all too neatly into place.

It’s hard to know how to approach Hamlet 2, hard to know how to sum up the rollercoaster of responses it invites, the constant swerving from tedium to gut-busting astonishment to strange fascination with just how far the film is willing to plumb Marschz’s not so winning dementia. From the opening montage of his embarrassing non-career in bad TV and infomercials, to highlights of his two-hander stage version of Erin Brokovich, to his endless humiliation at the hands of a spouse who clearly regards his bunk sperm as a sign of his general impotence, to his virtual invisibility as an entity at his place of employment—when the kids playing in the gym where he’s forced to hold his drama classes hit him in the head with a volleyball, it seems less out of spite as utter disregard—Marschz is a parade of fathomless schadenfreude, though only roughly half of the film ever really provokes laughter.

I have to assume Coogan however is laughing all the way to the bank. A distinctive talent with an unusually, palpably sharp comic edge, Coogan is clearly cruising for a big break here, hoping to reach the sort of audience that would never bother with something like 24-Hour Party People, which features Coogan’s outstanding leading performance as Manchester music impresario Tony Wilson, or Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, the two films Coogan’s made with English director Michael Winterbottom. I certainly can’t knock the guy for trying to branch out, but his hamming in Hamlet 2 is taken to such a grotesque extreme that it’s hard to imagine this film making him the bankable star he arguably deserves to be. Dude rollerblades to work in a kaftan.

More bizarre and self-effacing a turn however comes from, get this, Elizabeth Shue, who makes an unexpected appearance as… Elizabeth Shue. She’s apparently given up acting to be a nurse in Tucson, Arizona, where she’s practically mauled by a salivating Marschz eager to brush up against anything vaguely resembling fame. It wouldn’t be so shocking to see Shue turn up in a thankless role if she weren’t playing herself, reciting dumbed-down versions of the sort of smart comments about the heartlessness of the industry she made in her interview with director Mike Figgis for the Hollywood issue of Projections from a few years back. She later has to sit through Marchz’s bombastic—albeit very entertaining—production and make stupid “Wow!” faces the entire time. Like the rest of us, I guess she just doesn’t know what else to say.