Rough stuff from the French misanthrope, Gaspar Noé. An exceedingly brutal rape sets in motion an errant vendetta by the victim's former and current boyfriends: "Fucking B-movie revenge crap," as the former and more reluctant one puts it. (Noé's vision of humanity at large: the shadowy figure who appears at the far end of the underground passage in mid-rape, and unhurriedly turns and leaves.) It seems a little odd to speak of any sequence of events being "set in motion," however, inasmuch as the action of the entire film is laid out, as in Memento, in reverse order: effect precedes cause. Those who saw the director's I Stand Alone (of which they will be immediately reminded when its lead actor puts in a cameo appearance at the outset: "I slept with my daughter") will not need to be warned of what they are in for, and yet even they might get more than they bargained for. (And at the same time, less. ) Noé fancies himself an alternative, an antidote, to the glibness and slickness of Hollywood, but the retort to that would be that he merely favors one sort of distortion over another. He here makes two concerted efforts to drive you out of the theater in horror and disgust (the "revenge" and the rape, in that order of occurrence) and a more tempered effort the remainder of the time to drive you out in boredom and exasperation. (The roaming camera, ungenerous with the simplest of information, sometimes seems to be strapped into a carnival ride.) Because of the backasswards structure, the worst is over after an hour, and all that awaits you is the compensatory nude scene with the real-life couple, Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel -- equal-opportunity nudity -- and the final nostalgic plunge into bathos. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd