BY STEVE RAMOS

Irreversible

PARK CITY, UTAH -- The Salt Lake City theater manager fainted somewhere around 10 minutes into Gaspar Noé's new film, Irreversible. In the shocking scene, a bystander in a Parisian leather bar gets his head pummeled into bloody pulp by an assailant swinging the end of a fire extinguisher.

Numerous members of the Sundance Film Festival audience fled to the exits. Others shut their eyes. Meanwhile, the theater manager slowly regained consciousness as the film continued. It's safe to say he never saw the shock coming.

A cinema shocker like Irreversible starts out as a little picture watched by select audiences inside Sundance Film Festival screening rooms throughout Salt Lake City and the festival's home base in nearby Park City. Irreversible has received acclaim at previous film festivals at Toronto and Cannes. It's already enjoyed a successful European release, but here at Sundance, it's a niche film at best.

Yet Irreversible, as well as other Sundance shockers like visual artist Matthew Barney's avant-garde film epic, Cremaster III, and Neil LaBute's film adaptation of his stage play, The Shape of Things, have the potential to make huge impacts. In fact, when it comes to pushing dramatic boundaries and generating audience response, a movie like Irreversible is revolutionary.

Fainting, praising
It's been two days since the fainting incident, and Sundance Institute founder Robert Redford sits for a rare morning interview at a Park City hotel. He normally keeps a low profile during the 10-day film festival, but he's decided to talk about the challenge of sustaining Sundance's artistic mission in a social climate that's becoming more and more conservative.

Pulling his glasses off the bridge of his nose, Redford describes Sundance as a haven for all types of artistic expression. It doesn't matter whether people enjoy what they see or not. Irreversible, he says, represents the festival's spirit of artistic freedom. It's a film he's proud to have here, especially because so many people didn't like it.

"I think it's great that some people didn't like the film," Redford says, leaning toward the table. "This is a forum where filmmakers can take risks, and that means, sometimes, a theater manager may pass out during your film."

Many of the 129 feature films playing at this year's Sundance Festival contain an element of surprise. It's what audiences have come to expect from the annual showcase of independent film that's become the country's best-known festival.

Of course, the surprises vary -- from actors tackling new and different roles to filmmakers presenting stories that have never been honestly told before. In the Las Vegas romance, The Cooler, veteran actor William H. Macy bares all of his manhood for an intimate sex scene with co-star Maria Bello. TV actress Katie Holmes shows a grittier side of herself in writer/director Peter Hedges' comic drama, Pieces of April, in which she plays an East Village twentysomething attempting to host her family's Thanksgiving dinner.

With thirteen, her coming-of-age drama about teen-age girls experimenting with sex and drugs in order to be popular, director Catherine Hardwicke propels co-stars Evan Rachel Wood and Nikki Reed through an honest but grueling story. In Capturing the Friedmans, winner of this year's Documentary Grand Jury Prize, first-time documentary director Andrew Jarecki builds an honest and engaging account of a middle-class Long Island family ripped apart by the horrible sex crimes charged against the father and his youngest son.

Photo By Steve Ramos

Gaspar Noé says his controversial films, including Irreversible, are part of his plan to "show the truth about people, no matter what others say."

All these films contain their share of challenges. Still, it takes a bold film like Irreversible to generate a communal gasp from the audience. Irreversible is an erotic drama told in reverse order. Its soundtrack rumbles throughout the film with an unsettling, pounding volume.

Real-life couple Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassell play the on-screen pair whose lives are torn apart by a violent sex crime. Revenge becomes the order of the day, as Noé unravels the violent origins of a shocking murder. Grainy photography and fast-moving camerawork complete the eclectic package. Irreversible is an assault on the senses. More importantly, it's an assault on one's heart.

'Man as animal'
It's now five days after the fainting incident, and Irreversible screens again, this time at Park City's Egyptian Theatre, one of the town's best-known landmarks. The theater is packed with a capacity crowd, and Noé takes to the stage to introduce his film.

The film runs without incident, meaning no one in the audience faints, although a stream of moviegoers leaves the theater during an extended rape scene midway through the movie. Many of the people who remain until the conclusion applaud enthusiastically at the end.

Some of the moviegoers swarm around Noé. They ask questions about his eclectic filmmaking technique. A few newfound fans request his autograph.

Actor Paul Schneider, who stars in the romance drama, All the Real Girls, one of 16 films competing for Sundance's Dramatic Grand Jury Prize, leaves the theater dazed and utterly confused. He has nothing to say to Noé. Basically, Schneider wants to go back to his hotel room and think about what he's just watched. He sits silently on a Park City shuttle bus. Asked what he thought about Irreversible, Schneider doesn't want to talk about the movie. A moment later he changes his mind.

"I feel like someone has opened a small box of hell here in Park City, and these sheep don't know it," Schneider says, gesturing at some rambunctious passengers on the bus. "I don't know if I liked what I saw, but I need to watch it again."

The following morning, I tell Noé about the fainting theater manager at Irreversible's initial Sundance screening, and he acts surprised. He hasn't heard the news about the furor surrounding his first festival screening or Redford's positive comments about Irreversible earlier in the week.

Irreversible is the only festival film that warrants a printed warning posted on the walls of the festival's main box office. When a local TV reporter warns viewers to check out the content of Sundance films before buying tickets -- "because they're unrated!" -- you sense that she's probably referring to Irreversible.

In person, Noé is a soft-spoken, unassuming man. He's dressed casually in a T-shirt and jeans. His shaved head accentuates his youthful appearance and small build. He could pass as some film-student hopeful instead of the acclaimed filmmaker he truly is.

Photo By Steve Ramos

Actor Paul Schneider said after watching Irreversible he felt that someone "opened a small box of hell here in Park City. I don't know if I liked what I saw, but I need to watch it again."

Sitting in an empty office suite down the hill from the Egyptian Theater, Noé says he understands when some people don't like his films. His previous features, Carne and I Stand Alone, possessed brutal depictions of human cruelty and hostility. In fact, I Stand Alone jarred audiences with a scene of unimaginable horror -- a father raping and butchering his daughter.

Irreversible, however, takes Noé's cynical feelings about mankind to brutal extremes. Time Reveals Everything was the movie's original title, until Noé chose Irreversible as a name that was truer to the film's eclectic spirit.

Noé says he has only one goal in mind when it comes to reactions to Irreversible: He wants the people who stay in the theater through the end to react positively to his film.

"This is a story about man as an animal," Noé says, looking out a balcony into the Park City streets. "That's basically what we are -- animals. We eat meat. We fight one another. I want to show people as we are. I want to show the truth about people, no matter what others say."

A dazzling masterpiece
Last year was a good one for independent films. Jennifer Aniston attracted sizable audiences to the big hit at Sundance 2002, the infidelity drama, The Good Girl. In One Hour Photo, comic actor Robin Williams gave a creepy performance as an unbalanced clerk at a discount retailer who turns out to be a stalker, and it turned a sizable profit on its way to becoming a significant indie hit.

Yet it's unclear whether either of these films made a lasting impression on its audiences. The most memorable detail about the smash romantic comedy My Big Fat Greek Wedding is simply that it's earned $222 million so far in box office. In fact, the 7 percent share of the 2002 box office accumulated by specialty films -- a 3 percent increase from 2001 -- can be attributed to the success of Greek Wedding, along with other popular entertainments like Monsoon Wedding and Y Tu Mamá También.

By comparison, films like Irreversible and The Shape of Things are akin to someone pounding a hammer on the side of one's head -- you feel their effects long after the film has ended.

For those in the business of buying and releasing independent movies, the statistic that shows the proportion of 50- to 59-year-old moviegoers doubling to 10 percent of the marketplace is good news. Adult moviegoers want to watch adult-oriented movies.

The question is whether they want to watch something as challenging as Cremaster III, Matthew Barney's three-hour epic that's a sequel of sorts to his five-film Cremaster cycle.

At a prestigious art exhibition like the Venice Biennale, Barney, a New York-based artist, is a celebrity. He's undoubtedly America's most esteemed new millennium artist, creating an extravagant body of work that includes installations, filmed performances and epic videos.

Writer/director Matthew Barney also performs in his shocking Cremaster III.

The pinnacle of Barney's artwork is his Cremaster series; his latest entry, Cremaster III, is the cycle's fifth film. In it he weaves the history of free-masonry and Celtic mythology with a series of scenes that include a giant striding across a rocky island, a demolition derby inside Manhattan's iconic Chrysler Building and a climactic confrontation between a Scottish highlander and a leopard woman in the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum.

On the Saturday afternoon before the first screening of Cremaster III, Barney sits quietly in a vacant sushi restaurant. He wears a T-shirt and jeans, and his close-cropped hair and well-scrubbed face makes him look younger than his 35 years. A handful of journalists are expected for interviews. While Barney might be surrounded by admirers at the Venice Biennale, here at Sundance he's something of an unknown commodity.

His latest Cremaster film is a true masterpiece, a work of exceptional, personal art that dazzles at every moment. It's more experimental than any feature film has the right to be.

Barney explains that the series' title is derived from the cremaster muscle in the male genitals, the muscle that's responsible for an erection. After watching his films, this explanation matches perfectly with their spirit.

Cremaster III is indeed beautiful, but is it excessive?

"I would not call myself an excessivist," Barney says, taking long pauses between his answers. "There are certain things and certain ideas that need to be layered and stacked high enough, well, when you add layers to things you also have to subtract them. My work is more object-based than conventional films. I start with a place and a location. The environment is designed before the story."

Barney intentionally follows no clear narrative path in Cremaster III, and the film is more powerful for it. There's little dialogue mixed with its beautiful and complex images.

Later that evening, Cremaster III plays to a packed audience inside a multiplex theater at Park City's main shopping plaza. It's a venue more accustomed to action blockbusters like Spider-Man and XXX.

The film's greatest shock occurs in its second half. Barney's character, a custodian at the Chrysler Building, sits in a barbershop chair in the upper reaches of the building. He's stripped, and there's a large gill where his penis should be. Dark-suited goons wearing aprons surround the custodian and shove a metal fragment into his mouth, forcing a fleshy sack to emerge from his anus. A plastic sheet covers the man's face. When a string of clay teeth fall out of the bloody sack, the audience moans in unison.

Cremaster III ends in a segment filmed at the Guggenheim Museum. Las Vegas showgirls dance on the rotunda's main floor and a Scottish Highlander climbs the museum's famed ramps. A woman in glass platform boots changes into a leopard and flies across the rotunda to fight the Highlander. The scene is beautifully bizarre.

Photo By Steve Ramos

Neil LaBute created a stir at Sundance with the film version of his stage play, The Shape of Things.

When the film is over, a young man in the audience asks Barney the first question at a post screening question-and-answer session: "What the heck?"

Barney doesn't even answer. Instead, he goes to the next question.

"I was interested in making the Chrysler Building a character and giving it the agency of a character, a problematic character," he says. "I wanted the building to have a body aspect to it, to be a phallus and a bowel. If the Chrysler Building was a phallus, it would be made out of shit, and the film tries to present that from the outside."

Barney leaves Sundance the morning after his screening to complete his large installation at the Guggenheim in time for the show's February opening. He says he's glad to be at Sundance, showing his latest film in a theater instead of a museum. He's also excited about plans to release Cremaster III theatrically along with the other Cremaster films.

Barney's reputation might be limited to the visual art community, but he says the Internet is sharing his work with all types of people. Some of them don't like what they see. Others are inspired. Still, he's willing to take a chance and put his work before the public to reach as many people as possible.

Barney didn't bother to respond to the young man whose only question about Cremaster III was, "What the heck?" Still, there's one thing worth remembering -- that same man stayed for the entire three-hour film. He could have walked out, but he couldn't stop watching.

The word works
"It's a great word," actor Paul Rudd tells me during commercial breaks of the Philadelphia Eagles-Tampa Bay Buccaneers championship football game on TV. "It's more powerful than 'bitch.' It starts with that hard 'C' sound and ends with a forceful 'T.' It makes an impact, just the sound of it, and that's all about Neil (LaBute). He knows how to provoke people with dialogue."

Rudd is one of the stars of writer/director Neil LaBute's film adaptation of his stage play The Shape of Things, about a nerdy English student (Rudd) who falls in love with an eccentric art student (Rachel Weisz). Things are looking up until he learns the reasons behind her romantic actions toward him.

LaBute has punched audiences' buttons before. His debut film, In the Company of Men, about a pair of male office workers who collaborate in deceiving a deaf female colleague, raised the ire of feminists. His follow-up film Your Friends & Neighbors also generated controversy for its hard-hitting look at male-female relationships.

The Shape of Things starring Rachel Weisz and Paul Rudd.

Rudd performed The Shape of Things onstage throughout its run. He says by the time they made the movie, he knew every subtle detail about his character. He also understood why LaBute asked him to play the part and why he gave him such a choice word of dialogue.

"I have such a nice-guy face," Rudd says, laughing. "You don't expect someone like me to call someone 'cunt.' You don't believe it. So it's more powerful. It says something about what I'm feeling. When we performed the play in London, the word didn't make much of an impact. The British use 'cunt' all the time. But when we took the play to New York, it became a big deal. I don't think there's a worse thing you can call a woman, and that's why the word is there."

A couple of days later, LaBute arrives in Park City, nursing a cold. He's a large, bearish man with clunky glasses and a shaggy mane of hair. He laughs when I tell him about the audience reaction to his choice line of dialogue at the film's climax.

This is the era of blockbusters and a razzle-dazzle sense of make-believe images meant to assault the eyes. Just think of Spider-Man, XXX, the upcoming Daredevil and The Matrix 2 and 3 and all the other blockbuster entertainments that generate a response from audiences with elaborate special effects. The Shape of Things exists on the opposite end of the playing field.

LaBute intentionally shot the film like a theatrical play, and its dialogue ends up jolting the audience more than anything else. The film thrives on the power of its words. Its impact is based on an audible shock, and there's nothing more jarring.

"I treat the work as a collaboration, and I like the actors to make suggestions," LaBute says. "I listen to what they say, and I make the changes if I like their suggestions. I'm not married to the words, but if it doesn't work, we remain with what's on the page. That word, Paul's word at the end, that works."

The role of shock
Asked about the graphic content of his movie Irreversible, Noé says he wants audiences to feel the pain his characters are experiencing. He doesn't want it to be an entertaining trip to the movies. He refers to past films by Sam Peckinpah (Straw Dogs) and Stanley Kubrick (A Clockwork Orange). Irreversible, says Noé, is about living life with its cruel honesties intact.

If you take Noé at his word, the concept of a standout scene of violence or disgust in a movie like Cremaster III or Irreversible is acceptable because the films are considered serious and artistic in their intent. They shock, but the types of shocks they elicit are different from the jolts one finds in a horror movie like Darkness Falls.

Violence in mainstream narrative films -- whether rousing war dramas like Black Hawk Down and Windtalkers or a high-brow period epic like Gangs of New York -- seems appropriate for most audiences. Yet you never know what might upset someone. The Sundance drama, Buffalo Soldiers, which depicts American soldiers acting badly in Cold War Berlin, upset one woman so much she threw a bottle at the screen. Perhaps she felt the movie was unpatriotic.

There have been other cinema shocks. Larry Clark's Bully and Kids showed teen-age life in an honest and brutal manner. Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and Leonardo DiCaprio's The Basketball Diaries all received more than their share of controversy. The shock at the climax of Catherine Breillat's sexually charged coming-of-age drama Fat Girl (A Ma Soeur) sent audiences reeling.

If you're looking for images from the 2003 Sundance Film Festival, entertainment magazines will flash photos of visiting celebrities like Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, Pop star Britney Spears and veteran actor Al Pacino. Soon after the last publicist has left Park City, however, the impact of these celebrity sightings will quickly fade.

The films are what matter. That's what Redford will tell you. And at least one of these Sundance shockers -- Irreversible, The Shape of Things and Cremaster III -- is destined to become a scandalous art-house festival smash.

To some, they're cinema violence. To others, they offer deeply intellectual examinations of social rage, power relations and the extremities of life itself.

Is the shock simply a trick, a gratuitous attempt by the filmmaker to generate some attention? That's an answer audiences need to decide for themselves.

E-mail Steve Ramos

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