Relishing his power to shock

Does the devil order the halibut? Sitting down for lunch with filmmaker Gaspar Noe -- whose work tours a world rife with suicide, incest, racism, murder, drug use, rape and countless other outrages -- one finds it difficult not to expect a frothing, raving madman. The gentle, self-effacing manner with which Noe presents himself is all the more shocking for its politesse.

His latest film, “Irreversible,” generated scandal from the first seconds of its first screening at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. The film opens with the closing credits scrolling up backward, which reportedly caused jeers from moviegoers who suspected a projection error. Starring real-life couple Vincent Cassel and Monica Bellucci -- the Brad and Jennifer of Europe -- the film is, in the director’s words, “a rape and revenge film told in reverse.”

The aftermath comes first, and the viewer is left reeling, attempting to decipher who is doing what and why as the camera, operated by Noe, whirls and staggers through the depths of a Paris sex club. As characters emerge from the hellish murk, a man is bludgeoned to death with a fire extinguisher, his face reduced to a bloody, disfigured mess.

The film’s centerpiece, both in its structure and its story, is an excruciating, nine-minute-plus rape scene, filmed in one long, seemingly endless take. Powerful and extremely unsettling, the scene pushes some viewers to the extremes.

“Some people fainted in Cannes, in Sundance, in Edinburgh,” Noe reports in Los Angeles with the satisfaction of a job well done. “Maybe people will faint in the theaters here too. You really feel strong and proud of the movie to know people fainted. When I was a kid, I heard that for ‘The Exorcist.’ This is a physical response to a movie that wants to be physical. That means their brains couldn’t take it because something seemed so real. I like the fact that you can hypnotize people and make them believe this fiction is a part of their life.”

For those who remain in the theater, the film in a sense eases up after the rape scene. Finally reaching the portion of Cassel and Bellucci’s life before the tragic events of their nightmarish evening out, the viewer now sees everything through an eerie prism of predestination, such that a train ride or a lover’s tender embrace seems tainted by violence and mayhem. It is difficult not to focus entirely on the film’s garish and lurid opening sequences, causing many viewers and journalists alike to dismiss the film’s second half entirely.

As Noe says, “I think that people who have read about the film expect the whole thing to be like the beginning. They get to the rape scene, it’s only 40 minutes into the movie, and it’s like it’s over. They don’t know what else to expect, because most articles never talk about what happens after. People think, now we’re done, it can’t get worse because no one talks about the end.”

Excited to talk about the technical aspects of the filming -- the rape scene was shot six times, digital effects and hidden cuts were used for the fire extinguisher assault, Bellucci did her own hair and makeup -- Noe is careful to isolate the painful, staggering malevolence he depicts on screen with an “it’s only a movie” shrug.

“When you see how the special effects were done, you’re amused by the responses,” he says, “because we were laughing on the set between takes. You don’t see the joy we had on the set, you just see this heavy nightmare world.”

A devotee of such films as “Spetters” and “I Spit on Your Grave,” Noe gussies up the exploitation film tradition in the guise of French art films, creating a strange, multicultural hybrid. Closer in spirit to such down-and-dirty filmmakers as Larry Clark or Abel Ferrara than rarefied directors like Eric Rohmer, Noe is not bothered by those who would label him a simple-minded sleaze merchant, pushing the obvious buttons to shock his audience with the tired notion of transgression.

“I’ve heard so many things about me,” he says. “You care about what your father and mother say about you, but other people have all kinds of opinions, positive and negative. You get a lot of strength from your enemies, though. You feel powerful when someone spends a whole page attacking you.”

His shaved head accentuating dark-rimmed, deep-set eyes, Noe, 39, describes himself as “kind of French, though I have no French blood.” He was born in Argentina, and his family moved to New York for five years when his father, an artist, won a Guggenheim grant. Later moving back to Argentina, they would eventually relocate to France when his mother’s leftist politics ran afoul of the ruling dictatorship.

Following a two-year technical film school and a stretch as a half-hearted philosophy student, Noe made the short film “Carne,” which screened at Cannes in 1991. His first feature, “I Stand Alone,” took some five years to complete. Noe is surprised at how quickly “Irreversible” came together.

After he met Bellucci and Cassel, the three decided to do a film together. Meeting with possible backers in June 2001 with little more than an idea, they had only a 12-week window before Bellucci was due in Australia to begin work on “The Matrix Reloaded” that September. With six weeks of pre-production and six weeks of shooting, Noe was forced largely to figure out his film as he made it, working with a brief three-page outline and no scripted dialogue.

“I went from one extreme to the other,” he says. “In one case I had a lot of time but no money, in the other I had a lot of money but no time. The thing that really helped was that it was not a film I was thinking of beforehand. If something didn’t work, it just became part of the experience. I’m happy that even if the finished movie is not perfect, it’s perfect compared to what I expected it to be.”

Finished with lunch, as he steps into an elevator, Noe begins to explain how he digitally added an image of the attacker’s penis into the end of the rape scene. A woman, innocently sharing the same elevator car, peers suspiciously over her shoulder. As she steps off at her floor, she notes with a combination of shock and amusement, “All this talk of penises in an elevator.” After an awkward beat, as the doors begin to slide closed, Noe adopts the voice of a sexploitation trailer announcer, gleefully pronouncing, “They’re everywhere!”

A serious artist disguised as a sideshow hustler, or perhaps the other way around, Gaspar Noe is undoubtedly a filmmaker of amazing skill who wields a firm hand over the medium’s capabilities. Exactly what, if anything, he has to say or to what true use he puts his tremendous talents is an entirely different matter.