Newsnight Review discussed the latest release from France - Gasper Noe's Irreversible.

Watch the whole programme

(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

MARK LAWSON:
Bill Buford, it gives a measure of this film that one of the characters is called "man beaten to death in club". Can the level of violence suggested by that be justified?

BILL BUFORD:
Hard to say. This is probably the ugliest film experience I've ever had. I think it goes out of its way to make violence the point of the film. Although it implicitly argues that violence is truth, it exaggerates violence and distorts violence. The man who's beaten to death at the club is accompanied by a crashing crescendo of sounds which are not realistic. It's melodramatic violence. At the end of the rape scene there's a kicking of the victim, which is not what a real kicking of a victim sounds like. It was very melodramatic violence, and it was a sickening experience. I wouldn't have seen it unless you made me see it. Having said that, as I thought about it afterwards, it invaded my head. As I was retrospectively reconstructing a film which is itself told backwards, I found images coming up which were talking to each other. The film starts with a very, very violent act, and then goes back in time to what is the beginning of an evening, when everything was happy and light, and the victim looks like she is going to be pregnant. It's the irony of the day going backwards, but a lot of those things were actually acts of male sexuality, that were all with some kind of irony. Any positive male sexual act also had a negative side. Any homoerotic act had a homophobic act. At the end of the day, I found it a terrifying indictment of the penis.

MARK LAWSON:
Germaine Greer, who might or might not approve of that. The central scene both in the discussion and the film is the nine-minute rape scene, which the British censor has said, we need to see every frame of that. Do we?

GERMAINE GREER:
I started out prepared to suffer this film. I thought it had a high ideal. I didn't quite know what it was, I thought it might be like a Chris Cunningham film or video. It thought it might be about desolation, the abomination of desolation. The vertiginous camera movements, the swooping cameras, the sudden, transfixing images of buggery, erections, ejaculations, and brutality, and then the atmosphere of homophobia, together with the self-loathing of the man in the club called Le Rectum... I thought: it's not pleasant, but it might be worthwhile. I might be getting somewhere, and it seemed to me for the first time I was watching something where they had taken on board what the art cinema and art video was doing.

MARK LAWSON:
Yet there's a "but" here!

GERMAINE GREER:
Then we get to a nine-minute scene where the woman is buggered, forcibly, with her face smashed into the ground in an underpass. But she is also, as far as I can see, and I wasn't actually watching, though I could hear it, she is beaten to death. They called her "la victime." I assume that she was as good as dead. But what is outrageous is that for the first time we have a fixed frame. It's the first thing we can see clearly. And it was treated voyeuristically. She was dressed in a voyeuristic fashion. She was posed around the under pass. It was absolutely gratuitous. To then move back from that into, first of all, the party scene. This interested me because one of the sub-motifs of this film about the chemical enhancement of pleasure, because it goes with what is in fact impotence. The whole action in the underpass was about impotence. It's about the penis driven beyond its power, really. We ended up in mawkishness, and I found that really offensive.

MARK LAWSON:
Both people, so far, have taken messages about the penis at different times. Paul, as Bill suggested, there's this very artsy structure in which it all goes backwards. It looks to me as if the director is trying to say that justifies the rest of it. It gives it an artistic justification. But does it?

PAUL MORLEY:
Nothing can justify the nine minutes. Technically, you can talk about all sorts of things he's doing with the film, and the fact that it begins and therefore ends in a way. Whether the way of making cinema is broken down as well, it's complete chaos. And it begins and ends with the piece of film he's making very nice and pretty. There's a sense he's doing things like that, and this nine-minute sequence, you can suggest, is the moment the film breaks in half. But nothing like that happens. What I'm trying to say is to justify that sequence, nothing can really justify it. However he explains it, as a piece of philosophy, film-making, nothing can justify those nine minutes. They are sickening, and actually quite banal and middle of the road, ultimately, because you don't see the penetration of the anus, or the blood. It's quite banal.

MARK LAWSON:
As Germaine says, to slow down the camera only for that scene...

PAUL MORLEY:
If the film is truly breaking in half, there should be a moment we move from the prettiness to the chaos, the movement towards death that's at the end. In the gay scenes, we're just seeing flashes of penis and sexual activity, in almost a prurient way. Whereas this one, we're held with it for nine minutes. There's titillation, because it's done in a way with the skirt riding up, and the rubbing of the thighs.

GERMAINE GREER:
It's her body you see, on and on.

BILL BUFORD:
I mean it's very, very creepy and out of control. The director made a quote about that, which sent shivers down my spine. The whole first part of the film, the camera is moving all the time, and whilst very accelerated at the beginning, it starts to slow down, and reaches a stillness at that scene. What he said was that he felt he had to hold the camera still, otherwise he would get aroused.

GERMAINE GASPS

MARK LAWSON:
Isn't that astonishing. This is the level of disgust that this film produced in me. The argument was over whether nine seconds should have been cut. I thought all 99 minutes should have been cut. What could someone get out of this film. People have argued it's some kind of warning against rape, but I can't think anyone watching it is going to commit a rape of that kind, of that fantastically psychopathic kind.

PAUL MORLEY:
There's nothing he's doing that can justify... You kind of know it.

GERMAINE GREER:
There's another subtext as well which I don't know about yet. But there was so much about it that was about south American migrant communities, all that underworldy thing, and that drug-fuelled party scene. It was all "not French". That was the curious thing about it, because, ultimately, we went back to kind of kinder, kirche, kuche. There, she was about to be pregnant: love, happiness, monogamy. Interestingly, those love scenes, which are meant to be tender, are not in the least sexy.

BILL BUFORD:
They were not entirely tender either. They were illusions to his wanting to take her up the backside, which alludes back to the rape scene. All of the tender moments had an ugliness to them. I don't think the point of the film is rape. I hate to be in a position of defending a film that I found to be a very ugly experience, but I think there's an intelligence underlying the film, which is about the terrors of the vagrant promiscuous male penis.

MARK LAWSON:
I suspect all three you of have probably spoken out against censorship in the past in various cases. It makes quite a good case for censorship this film, doesn't it Germaine?

GERMAINE GREER:
Never. There's no case for censorship, but there's a very good case for staying away, and not buying a ticket. And we would, none of us, have gone to it or bought a ticket, but you made us go!

PAUL MORLEY:
And we have it in our heads now, as well!

BILL BUFORD:
It's so invasive. It's in all of our heads.

PAUL MORLEY:
No piece of film can justify this.