I
Stand Alone
Not
Rated
Cinema 21 616 NW 21st Ave., 223-4515
7, 8:55 and 10 pm Monday-Wednesday, 7 pm Thursday, Oct. 11-14
In a recent magazine interview, filmmaker Paul Schrader, the
notorious screenwriter for Taxi Driver, said, "I had
an interesting lunch recently with a French director named
Gaspar Noe who wanted to do a film with me, something with
violence and pornography and all that. And I said to him,
'I don't think anyone's shockable anymore. There's no fun
left in it, you know?'" Oh, how wrong he was--on both counts.
Schrader's lunch date, Gaspar Noe, has made not only one
of the most shocking films in decades, but also one of the
most stylistically impressive, emotionally challenging,
thematically intimidating, astoundingly touching and, in
its own warped way, funny.
I Stand Alone, or Seul Contre Tous (Alone
Against All) grabs you by the hair, drags you around
the muck and then pushes your face into its world so far
that--if you last long enough--you will experience moments
of such bizarre, hideous beauty that you have no choice
but to be significantly moved. It attacks one's senses with
such transgressive power that by its end, one feels orgasmic,
flustered, simultaneously full and empty. It's one long
mindfuck, and a potent one that rattles in your brain long
after the movie's final, disquieting end.
With nods to Celine, Dostoevsky, Schrader, Godard and even
William Castle, I Stand Alone chronicles, as the
film's titles claim, the "tragedy of a jobless butcher struggling
to survive in the bowels of his nation." As the film opens,
the nameless butcher's entire life is inventively, humorously
revealed via a slideshow. It describes how a French World
War II orphan became a butcher, then went to prison for
stabbing a guy he thought raped his daughter. The movie
jettisons us to 1980 and into the head of said butcher (embodied
magnificently by Philippe Nahon), who, now released from
prison, is living an emasculated life with his pregnant
girlfriend and her obtrusive mother in a depressing housing
tract in France. His current domestic predicament only escalates
his alienation and rage, feelings made clear in angry interior
monologues that grow more bile-ridden as the film continues
(the man, like the film, isn't subtle). When his refusal
(or inability) to smile causes him to lose a job at a supermarket
deli, the butcher becomes a night watchman at a home for
the elderly, where he assists an old woman's euthanization.
Afterwards, he visits a porn theater and, during a hardcore
penetration close-up, he muses inwardly, "If you're a cock,
you gotta stay hard to be respected; [otherwise] your only
role and purpose is to be reamed."
Soon after, he fights with his mistress and, in one of
the film's most brutal moments, beats her, kicking her pregnant
stomach. The sick underbelly we have watched with amusement
and detachment has in fact been reamed. At this point, the
film's existential loathing gives us our first challenge:
The man we felt immediate sympathy for, who has made us
laugh with his stark philosophical observations, has finally
lost it and committed sickening violence. Oh, and he doesn't
feel bad about it. Confronting his modern audience, hardened
from years of on-screen violence, Noe essentially asks:
How do you like your underground hero now? Are you still
cheering him on?
Somehow, in many ways, we still do--which points to the
film's transgressive power. With dwindling money, no job
prospects and a gun, the butcher grows increasingly disgruntled
over everything--class, race, love, sexuality--and his thoughts
become both clear-headed and garbled. In the hands of a
more simplistic filmmaker, this could be tedious or predictable.
Noe, however, is not here just to shock. Like Taxi Driver,
I Stand Alone represents a national reflection and personifies
the unease with an unrelenting, complex protagonist. Noe
crafts a film that is so aesthetically violent--sharp
gunshot sounds are used as jarring, disarming tangents,
illustrating a shift in scenery or thought--that it is surprising
to realize just how little blood is actually shed in the
film. The movie deals almost entirely in thoughts
of violence, rather than acts. The butcher rattles on about
this or that problem, but mostly remains stuck in states
of fantasy or inertia.
Noe never slips in his assault on our normal film sensibilities.
In the film's most infamous moment, a title card flashes
on screen and cautions us: "You Have 30 Seconds to Leave
the Cinema." It's a bold move, one filled with humor and
horror (one part Godard, one part Castle), and despite the
shocking images and words that come before it, Noe still
manages to back up his warning. Perhaps more so than Taxi
Driver, I Stand Alone is true savage cinema--a
grim, nerve-wracking work of art that will finger parts
of your brain you never thought reachable.
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Willamette Week | originally
published October 6,
1999
|
