An Analysis Of Irréversible by Gaspar Noé.
The film in itself is pretty horrific and gruesome – the
film starts with the ending and essentially progresses in reverse, meaning the ending of the film is the beginning of the actual story – however I’m going to analyze things in a chronological order. The overall theme of the film is lust and revenge – this being said the film has a very warm color temperature throughout the film to emphasize this theme.
The scene I decided to cover is from the party leading up to the rape scene – being that the rape scene is just one continuous shot that leads from one space to the next. The first shot we can see the main characters in an elevator then entering the train station terminal at this point the characters just want to have fun and everything is still good and seemingly innocent. They are in an elevator and we assume the motivation of light is due to a light panel in the roof of the elevator – the color temperature is warm to keep with the theme. Alex’s ex is the only one with black shadows falling behind him to psychologically tell the audience that he is to be associated with evil.
The next shot is them stepping out of the elevator into the train station.The clean white walls that surround them juxtapose the idea of innocence to the oddly quiet train station - bad things are to come is foreshadowed by how bright the train station looks and the rich black of the night sky outside. The color temperature is still relatively warm and Alex’s Ex is the only one framed surrounded by complete darkness with the exception of a small red light flashing over his right shoulder – this indicates that he is just a ticking time bomb waiting to explode – which in the film he later does, and ends up killing someone.
The motivation for lights here is the Florescent light on the left upper corner of the frame – which are very orange meaning that Gaspar Noé probably had his color temperature set at 2000K – 2700K to create that warm glow on the bulb or placed some extra CTO around the bulbs. There is a very low contrast ratio on the characters as light would naturally bounce off the white walls and bring some soft bounce onto the characters.
Gaspar Noé makes use of many red flashing lights to indicate that things are to take a turn for the worst – the second indicator of this is when they step into the train and we see the row of red lights flash as though to scream at the audience saying –
THIS IS IMPORTANT! SOME HORRIFIC EVENTS ARE ABOUT TO TAKE PLACE, AND THEY ARE AT THE CENTER OF DANGER!
The follow up lighting analysis is of probably the most horrible and shocking/uncomfortable scene to watch not only in the entire movie but in the history of cinema – the rape scene. Alex is seen walking out onto the street. We know that it is late out because the streets are almost completely empty and she is walking alone. A lot of the ambience light is motivated by the sodium vapor
streetlights. There aren’t any other sources of light other than a few specs of street signs, a stray car or two and traffic lights
The sign above the walkway she enters Gaspar Noé gives a lot of attention to – it is a bright red sign that covers pretty much the whole frame – once again signaling the danger that is to come.
Once the camera tilts down from the sign, from here on the tone of the scene dramatically changes. The light in the street had a nice soft fall off with the contrast ratio not too high – in the walkway it is the complete opposite of that. The light is really hard top light with a hard fall off. This extreme contrast change signals the audience that something very bad is about to take place. Aside from the terrible scene taking place for what feels like an eternity probably one of the most horrific parts is seeing a silhouette of someone come in and notice what is happening and turn around – doing absolutely nothing about it.
The last shot I want to talk about is when Alex’s ex discovers her being rolled into an ambulance – he and Alex’s current lover are busy talking to some mobsters to arrange some type of revenge.
This is a really important moment in the lighting partly being because Alex’s ex has a seemingly calm and collected face – however behind him the police car light is flashing – much like how they where flashing at the train station as well as inside the train always behind him. This is to show the audience how he is slowly starting to loose it – he is just waiting for the right moment to explode.
I feel that Gaspar Noé did a really good job at using the lighting to carry the overall tone and mood for the story – even though it’s not the most pleasing or wonderful story to watch. His use of having warm shades within every frame really helped to create a whole lot of depth in each frame by creating layers within the visuals as well as character psychology.
I assume that is what he was trying to say throughout the film – life is filled with different layers and everything happens as a result of cause and affect – characters making decisions and events happen to thembased on the choices they made.
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