Unlike many would-be shockers, the warning on the box (you should be able to make out the large red 'ATTENTION' at least!) is richly deserved. The two films on this DVD, Seul Contre Tous plus its prequel Carne, run the sex-and-violence gamut from close-up unsimulated sexual intercourse (shown at greater length than I've ever seen in a supposedly mainstream film), full-frontal birth and underage incest through wife-beating, infanticide both in and ex utero, and genuine slaughterhouse footage involving horses. Even on a purely visual/visceral level, this material is not, to put it mildly, aimed at the squeamish or faint-hearted - and it's compounded by near-continuous voice-over narration that makes Norman Tebbit seem like a bleeding-heart liberal: relentlessly racist, sexist and homophobic, listening to it is as grimly nihilistic an experience as I've ever come across.

So how on earth is this even remotely watchable? It’s because Noé’s technique is absolutely riveting. I’ve now seen three films with his name on (two as director, one as cinematographer, the latter being Lucile Hadzihalilovic's child-abuse drama La Bouche de Jean-Pierre), and it’s clear he’s one of the tiny handful of contemporary film-makers whose style is more or less instantly recognisable, not just visually but also in the way he handles film. He invariably shoots in 2.35:1, often framing shots so that key details get cropped slightly out of frame (it's particularly unsettling when he does this with people's eyes), and his editing is even more striking. Instead of cutting or dissolving from one shot to the next, he either fades out abruptly, punctuates that fade with a pizzicato chord on the soundtrack, and then fades back in again equally quickly, often to the same shot that we left - or the camera makes a sudden violent lurch forwards to a close-up, accompanied by a loud gunshot on the soundtrack.

If that sounds tackily obvious in bald description, in the films themselves it’s surprisingly effective, not just the first time but also the tenth and twentieth. It’s a kind of simultaneous visual and aural dislocation that forcibly reminds you that the films' unemployed butcher protagonist can snap at any moment. In fact, despite my warning above, there's very little actual on-screen violence (just four relatively brief instances spread across both films), but the threat is ever-present - like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Noé's control of his material makes you feel that the films are much more graphic than they actually are.

Both films focus on the life and opinions of horse butcher Philippe Chevalier (the surname presumably a pun on his profession), the life being a relentlessly bleak saga of poverty, neglect, unemployment and prison, the opinions being an even more relentless stream of bile that spews out and drenches almost every scene. Left with a mute and possibly retarded teenage daughter, he mistakes her first period for the symptoms of an assault by a local Arab and exacts a vicious revenge that lands him in jail.

Emerging from his incarceration, he shacks up with a local café owner, gets her pregnant, fails to land a job, and after constant taunting beats her so badly that she aborts (the line "Your baby is hamburger meat now" is one of the more printable dialogue extracts, and should at least give you some idea of what you're in for). Leaving for Paris to escape detection, he tries and fails to get his life back on the rails, before rejoining his daughter in a hotel room for a two-way narrative-split climax that offers us a choice of ending - either of which is as amoral as they come. (Infanticide or incest? Take your pick).

More than a few critics have compared Seul Contre Tous with Taxi Driver, but the differences are as striking as the similarities. True, both films are about obsessive, deranged, murderous loners whose loathing of their environment and fixation on a particular teenage girl leads to a shockingly violent climax, and both films feature as much first-person monologue as they do dialogue (if not considerably more).

But Noé takes risks that Scorsese shied away from - while the young, charismatic Travis Bickle is essentially a confused blank slate on which others imprint their thoughts and opinions to create a distorted mishmash that he may not be entirely responsible for, the rather older, far less appealing Philippe Chevalier's views are entirely his own; his certainty about what's wrong with French society is unassailable in the extreme - women, foreigners, blacks, Arabs, Jews, homosexuals, anyone not immediately and unmistakably in sync with himself. It's pointedly set in 1980, in the dying days of the right-wing Giscard d'Estaing administration, when Jean-Marie Le Pen's overtly racist and neo-Nazi Front National was on the rise (is it a coincidence that Chevalier bears a passing physical resemblance to Le Pen?).

And whereas Travis reaches the end of Taxi Driver as at least some kind of hero, albeit a misguided one, there's no such redemption for Chevalier - either choice he makes at the end is utterly degrading in any conventional moral sense. In fact, it's precisely by refusing to offer us an easy way out that Noé makes his film so genuinely unsettling - its fearsome reputation dares us to sit through it (anyone tempted to walk out would have done so long before the William Castle-like "WARNING: YOU HAVE 30 SECONDS TO LEAVE THIS CINEMA" countdown appears). The constant stream of Godardian intertitles challenge our response to the film and its protagonist, and by offering us no easy way out, challenge our response to fascist ideas in general, and our often all too mute acceptance of their manifestation (this is more of an issue in France than it is in Britain, since at one point Le Pen had 15% of the popular vote).

Even more than Man Bites Dog, that other French-speaking 1990s masterpiece that confronts our lazy acceptance of violence as entertainment in all too uncomfortably direct a fashion, Seul Contre Tous and Carne rub our noses in our expectations, challenging us to sit through them and then taunting us for not enjoying ourselves. It's no coincidence that the word that crops up most often in narration, dialogue and intertitles is "moralité", though there's an infinite number of interpretations of the term on offer, not all of which necessarily coincide with the dictionary definition. Technically brilliant (especially considering the rock-bottom funded-by-friends budget), aesthetically striking and relentlessly disturbing, these are films that are hard to watch - but impossible to forget.

As for the DVD… well, I’ll get the bad news out of the way first of all, just in case you didn’t spot it in the infobar at the top of this review: the films are presented solely in the original French, and there are no subtitles. I’m a little surprised at this, given Noé’s forceful comments about Britain’s "medieval" censorship (this DVD is uncut, but the British theatrical and video versions of Seul Contre Tous suffered optical blurring during the porno scenes) - he must have known that there wasn’t a hope in hell of the uncut version getting a DVD release in Britain, and since French DVDs are also Region 2 PAL and English subtitles had already been translated for the cinema version, it wouldn’t exactly have cost a fortune to have had them added. But they weren’t, and it’s a French disc - so that’s that.

Apart from that slight drawback, the transfer of both films is excellent - in fact, given the shortcomings of the 16mm CinemaScope process they were both filmed in, it's hard to imagine they could ever get much better. I distinctly recall grain the size of golfballs on the big screen, but apart from a very faint texture here (which is generally restricted to interiors and low-light), there's precious little indication that the images didn't come from a 35mm source. Colours are impressively vibrant, artefacts are generally kept to a minimum, and the condition of each print is very good indeed - Carne has slightly more in the way of spots and scratches, but for the most part there's nothing to complain about. The correct framing of 2.35:1 has been respected - and, even better, the transfers are both anamorphic.

The sound is mono in the case of Carne and Dolby Digital 2.0 for Seul Contre Tous - both essentially being the sound formats of the cinema release. Considering that most of the soundtrack consists of the butcher's implacable narration and sudden, loud, punctuating sound effects, this is perfectly adequate, and the quality of the recording is so clear that even someone with only reasonable French like myself could make out every word (whether you'd want to, given the relentless verbal assault, is another matter…). Oddly enough, there are no chapter stops - or rather, you can select the start of each film, but that's it.

The inclusion of Carne is by far the most important extra, but there's plenty more to explore on the DVD. The trailer for Seul Contre Tous creates a generally disturbing impression of the film without using any actual footage from it.

A lengthy printed interview with Gaspar Noé is broken up into thirteen individual questions, each of which can be selected via the menu. If the questions are basic ("Why this film?", "Why a butcher?", "Why produce it yourself?"), the answers are impressively articulate, detailed and wide-ranging.

The butcher's monologues appear in printed form in two more sections - 'Le Boucher Recapitule' is a transcript of his opening narration from Seul Contre Tous, which sums up his life story to 1980 (and provides a snap précis of Carne in the process), while Le Boucher Cogite contains a large chunk of his narration from the rest of the film. Although I'd have preferred French subtitles (or indeed English ones!) so I could follow this material at the time of delivery, it's still nice to have it here.

'Seul Contre Tous dans les festivals' is an impressively lengthy list of major festival awards garnered by the film, while 'Filmographies' is exactly what you'd expect - covering Noé and his chief collaborators Lucile Hadzihalilovic and Dominique Colin, plus the four lead actors Philippe Nahon, Blandine Lenoir, Frankye Pain and Martine Audrain.

Finally, 'Réactions' consists of 41 one-line comments, both positive and virulently negative, from a whole range of French publications and cultural figures. Most would need translation, though Man Bites Dog co-director André Bonzel's "Un superbe fist-fucking cinematographique" can probably get by unaided.

All in all, apart from the lack of subtitles and the bizarre chapter decision (which I have to assume is deliberate, since the DVD otherwise offers plenty of selection options), this is about as good a disc as I could realistically have expected for what, after all, are a couple of decidedly low-budget, independently-financed films (one wouldn't really expect a full-scale Criterion-style treatment). You'll certainly need a decent command of the French language - and, more importantly, a cast-iron stomach - but this is one of the most genuinely groundbreaking feature debuts of the last few years, and shouldn't be ignored by anyone who thinks that in this jaded day and age it's impossible to be truly shocking any more.

Michael Brooke