French filmmaker Gaspar Noé was in a sweat several weeks ago at the Miami International Film Festival. He told me of an anonymous threat to kill him because of his transgressive Irréversible. He’d been looking over his shoulder, anticipating an attack. Back at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, he and his stars, Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel, were greeted with jeers and boos (and also applause) when they appeared for the press conference following Irréversible’s premiere.

Noé couldn’t have found it surprising that some Cannes critics were jolted by Irréversible’s most incendiary scenes: a guy is pummeled to death by a fire extinguisher in the bowels of the Paris gay bar Rectum, and there’s a seemingly endless, no-escape brutal rape in the corridors of a Paris Métro station. So why trap an audience into watching?

"There are days you don’t want to see such things," he conceded. "As for trapping people: when there are aggressions on the street, including rape, people come up to see. There’s a visual fascination. On television, such things are on all the time. I saw something recently of people killing each other with machetes. In movies, you have killings without emotions. But rape? It’s almost taboo in the cinema.

"I wanted to make a film I like. When I see Buñuel films, I like them. People talk about the scandal of Irréversible! A few people left the press screening, but there was no scandal. I can understand that this movie may shock some American distributors, who are more and more politically correct, because of the multiplexes. This film will be R-rated, or NC-17. Maybe in the 1970s, it would have just passed by."

Vincent Cassel added, "Why does a filmmaker have to justify his film? If everyone liked Irréversible, it would be strange. People I really love, I told them not to go. That’s the best advice I can give them." And Monica Bellucci, who plays the rape victim, had this to say: "I have friends who say they didn’t like it, but we were on the phone talking for hours. I said, ‘Are you sure you didn’t like it?’ A lot of people detest the film, but some love it. There’s a reason to make it: it’s an important, deep film."

And the rape scene? Noé explained, "My idea was to use Jo Prestia, who had been a rapist in an Eric Zonca movie. He was perfect. He used to be a boxer, a world champion of Thai kickboxing. He’s very, very nice. I introduced him to Monica, and she was scared not of the rape but that he would hit her. That wouldn’t happen. He knew how to box, how to control himself.

"It’s a totally artificial rape. Everything is simulated. Although it seems a continuous shot, actually, 60 little bits were put together from 20-minute continuous shots. There were nine months of post-production, many sleepless nights, putting the scenes together. Now the rape scene is credible; it wasn’t originally. The rapist’s penis wasn’t there originally, or blood on her face. Special-effects technology allowed us to add all that."

Bellucci was asked how they prepared. "I looked at various films concerning rape in the day, like Deliverance and The Accused. Gaspar only asked me to be strong and truthful. I did my best. The first day, we shot my love scene with Vincent. The rape scene in the Métro we shot four times, and then we chose the good version. It’s true, when I see the rape scene now, it hurts. But as Gaspar said, ‘The film is not a crime. It’s a film about a crime.’ "

And Noé concluded, "Compare it to real revenge movies like Mad Max and Death Wish. Irréversible isn’t a revenge movie. The guy seeks revenge on the rapist killer, but I don’t believe in that. We need to see the beast within us and then refuse it."

MY FAVORITE COMEDIAN IN THE WORLD is W.C. Fields, and he’s sinfully neglected, so I urge you to take plane, train, or snowmobile and get to the Brattle next Thursday, March 20, for an evening of merriment, a double bill of Fields’s final two starring movies, The Bank Dick (1940) and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941). Fields’s new biographer, James Curtis, introduces the 7 p.m. screening of The Bank Dick. In both works, you get a fairly friendly version of the bulbous-nosed performer’s patented larcenous, sucking-down-alcohol, foggy-brained, dog-and-child-hating persona. In The Bank Dick, he’s a small-town guy with a shrewish wife and a spoiled daughter who escapes his family by drinking and bragging afternoons away at his favored watering hole, the Black Pussy. In Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, he flies to a surrealist land in the sky, where he courts Margaret Dumont, Groucho’s usual squeeze. Both films are written by Fields under outrageous pen names. Both are fun, fun.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com.