Four movies in reverse
Whatever you think of him, Jean-Luc Godard was right about at least one thing: “Films should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.”
Although Godard rose in the film industry along with his fellow critics at the Cahiers du cinéma in the post-Second World War era who championed authenticity to real life, he soon added more and more voice-overs, used alienation techniques and attempted to reinvent the wheel with every new project.
And yet, that famous quotation attributed to him shimmers with an incontrovertible truth. The storyteller is in control of his or her narrative, and although the viewer expects the story to contain certain elements and developments, there is no obligation that they reflect linear reality.
Flashbacks may be the most obvious and common intrusion into linear storytelling, but sometimes, various parts in the present may be re-ordered as a diversionary tactic or to keep us on our toes. In this regard, one of the best-known examples from the past 30 years is Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, while Dunkirk showcases its own narrative sleight of hand in a unique fashion.
The re-ordering of pieces can also be strictly in reverse, which happens when one scene after another follows each other into the past. In these cases, for the sake of the viewer’s comprehension, the scenes almost always unspool in a linear fashion, but the scenes as units are ordered in reverse.
Below are four of the most interesting examples of films whose stories are told in different ways but always in reverse. Unusually, I have arranged them in chronological order.
Happy End (Šťastný konec, 1967)
Czech director Oldřich Lipský’s game-changing comedy pokes fun at communism while keeping all the gears in the viewer’s head turning at full speed throughout its 70-minute running time.
Accurately titled, though only in one direction, the film starts with a title card proclaiming “The End” of the story, follows up with an execution and ends with a birth. This is the happy end. However, the diegesis (that is, the actual world of the film, in which a man is born and ends up being executed) is far less happy.
Grisly acts, like a guillotined head being separated from a body, become comedic when played in reverse. And yet, the message is clear: The way a story is told to us has a major impact on our emotional perception of the events. Under communism, the Czechoslovak government told people things in a deliberately twisted way to get a particular reaction from them. The film’s courtroom scenes, whose dialogue is sometimes even played in reverse, also forcefully conveys the absurdity one could expect from the legal system at the time.
Betrayal (1983)
In this adaptation of the Harold Pinter play of the same name, the tragic affair between a woman and her husband’s best friend ultimately ends at the relatively happy beginning, when the two first met each other many years before the opening scene.
Title cards indicate the reverse passage of time (every time, it’s a while earlier), but there is one constant: a dread that hangs over the events, even as the relationship between the two leads become younger and younger, more and more “pure”. As in most of the films discussed here, we know how it will end (in misery), so even when there is joy, the dramatic irony always adds melancholy to the mix.
The film (and the source material) shows us characters from a different angle and over a very long period of time. We get to know them very well even though the tension often explodes in dramatic fashion before we see how it builds. But when it builds, our knowledge of how it will end — the fact that the future is already written — increases our anxiety even more.
Memtento (2000)
The highest-profile film on the list (because it is American and had the biggest budget by far) is also the most complex of them all. The scenes are re-ordered not only on the horizontal axis but seemingly on the vertical axis as well. All of this is done to suggest how slippery the main character’s grasp of the truth really is.
Said character is Leonard, whose memory loss means he can barely function in the present, although events from the past — in particular, before his wife’s murder — remain crystal clear. The scenes in the present are told in reverse and start, like most of these films, with a murder. But we also get flashbacks in black and white when Leonard recounts an event he remembers or remembers hearing.
Unlike the other films here, Memento cannot easily be broken down into separate units. The river of time flows in many directions at once, and even though we have more information than Leonard does, our oblique sharing of his frame of mind often makes it a challenge to fit all the pieces together. It is to director Christopher Nolan’s everlasting credit that the film makes perfect sense when we reach the final credits.
Irreversible (Irréversible, 2002)
Gaspar Noé’s film is unusual in that its 12 scenes are all shot in seemingly unbroken takes, which have traditionally emphasised purity of space and time. The transitions are smooth, but nothing is quite as it seems.
The media focus has always been on the gruesome nine-minute rape scene, but structurally the film is similar to Betrayal in that it offers a straightforward reversal of its constituent parts. The effect is the same, as the dread of the skull-crushing opening never leaves the viewer and is made all the more heartbreaking by the kaleidoscopic happy end.
Noë presented a chronological version of his film, entitled Irreversible – Straight Cut (Irréversible – inversion intégrale), out of competition at the 2019 Venice Film Festival, but the possibility of a theatrical release is still uncertain, not least because of the impact of the 2020 COVID-19 crisis on cinemas around the world.
