Nothing but cheap porn

Sickened by the first sight I had of it, and tired of reading endless articles about its anal rape of a prone woman by a bisexual assailant, I don't propose to dwell on Gaspar Noe's film for very long.

I've had my early say, and nothing I've read denouncing it (or me) changes my mind: it's pornography.

The sole gimmick on which it stakes its preposterous claim to artistic integrity is to tell the entire story back to front, from an opening murder of the suspected rapist (by Vincent Cassel) in a homosexual club called The Rectum - his head is smashed to bloody pulp with a fire extinguisher - to the sunny morning when his victim (played by Cassel's wife, Monica Bellucci) awakes with no intimation of what awaits her.

A copy of Dunne's An Experiment with Time, a fashionable crib for novelists and playwrights from HG Wells to JB Priestley, has been placed like a temporal clue to induce a certain class of critic to lend academic respectability to the film's offences, though it appears an unlikely book to be reading in a French park - especially in the English edition.

My contempt for the film extends to those mealy-mouthed commentators who fear to endorse it, but are politically incapable of damning it, and prefer to call it simply "controversial", or insist that society needs to stand by like the immobile camera for nine minutes and watch a simulated rape in an underpass in order to understand feminine vulnerability.

Irreversible
Cert: 18