Sauvage

This is an excellent movie. Probably the topic isn't everyones cup of tea, and it sure isn't a comfortable and pleasant watch. But what you do get, is a very realistic, honest and unadorned account of the daily struggle to survive of a young male street-prostitute in a big city (Paris?). No romanticizing here, it's all bleak, harsh and hopeless. What makes it extra touching, is the fact that the main character isn't just driven by opportunistic motives, but desperately longs for love and affection, which he sadly enough projects on the wrong guy.

Actor Felix Maritaud gives a very strong and convincing performance, very brave too, since director Camille Vidal-Naquet doesn't hold back in realism, with a fair amount of graphic sex. This is clearly not aimed to tittilate any erotic senses with the viewer, if anything it's mostly akward and sad to watch, but it adds to the authenticity of this movie. Hiding or masking the sex would have felt like fake.

Another strong aspect of the movie is the fact that it doesn't moralize. We never hear how the main character came to do what he does or what his background is, so no justifications or freudian explanations like a troubled youth or anything. It's clear that he doesn't see anything wrong in what he does or why he should change his way of life, however pathetic and hard it may be. The choice he makes in the end of the movie is in line with this, although for us it's hard, if not almost impossible to understand.

Sauvage is the debut film of writer/director Camille Vidal-Naquet, a former professor of film studies, and takes as its subject the daily grind of a male prostitute. Striking a delicate balance between misery porn and objectively delineating the day-to-day of being a sex worker, the film is undeniably bleak, but it's not what you would define as miserablism. Remaining detached from what it depicts, it adopts a clinically dispassionate approach, one that remains always non-judgemental. Intermixing the degrading reality of selling one's self with unexpected moments of tenderness and warmth, Vidal-Naquet taps into something deeply compelling. Some will be put off by the (very) graphic sex scenes, the passivity of the main character, or the lack of much of a plot. However, for everyone else, although it certainly isn't multiplex fare, there's a hell of a lot to admire here.

Set in Strasbourg, Sauvage tells the story of Léo (an extraordinarily committed performance from relative newcomer Félix Maritaud), a homeless, drug-addicted male prostitute, whose name, like those of his fellow sex workers, is never spoken in the film. As the film begins, Léo is attending a doctor (Lionel Riou), revealing bruises, a split lip, a nasty cough, and stomach pains. Upon examining him, the doctor appears to begin sexually molesting him. However, all is not as it seems in the scene, which is a genius way to open the movie. The episodic narrative then follows Léo from one sexual encounter to the next, occasionally focusing on his relationship with gay-for-pay prostitute Ahd (Farid-Eric Bernard), with whom he is in love. Wearing perpetually filthy clothes, he drinks from gutters and eats from bins, has a litany of physical ailments, and on two occasions, other characters comment that he smells bad.

In preparation for making the film, Vidal-Naquet joined an outreach charity as a way to meet young male prostitutes. Intending to go on only a few runs over the course of a couple of weeks, he ended up spending three years visiting the men, all the while refining the script to make it as true to life as possible (all of Léo's sexual encounters in the film come from stories told by the actual sex workers).

The film reveals nothing about Léo's background - where he comes from, how he became a prostitute, where are his family - and many of the choices he makes prompt more questions than answers, with much of what he does tied to his notions of personal freedom. Even his final choice, which is undeniably selfish and ill-advised, is consistent with the psychology of the character as seen up to that point. He isn't especially interested in a life away from drugs and prostitution, and so he takes the violence, degradations, and humiliations, because every now and then he meets someone who provides him with a degree of transitory happiness.

Léo doesn't share in the detachment, coldness, or bitterness of his fellow prostitutes, with all of them finding it bizarre that he's willing to kiss clients. However, the important point is that Léo doesn't kiss on-demand, he does so only when it feels right. This in and of itself illustrates how different he is from the others, and how selling himself is not exclusively monetary - he is searching for genuine affection, and he seems incapable of establishing the same boundaries between himself and his clients as the other sex workers live by. He gives much more of himself than them, in the hopes of establishing a genuine human connection with someone. Indeed, Ahd says at one point, "it's like you enjoy being a wh-re", which he doesn't actually deny.

His fellow prostitutes are healthier, cleaner, more financially independent, more aware of the dangers of their occupation, never allowing emotions to become involved. But Léo is far more tender than any of them, and for all the harshness of his life, there is something Emersonian about him. Indeed, for much of the film, he has a pseudo-transcendentalist soul - he is relatively free of the norms of society and its institutions; he is at peace in and with nature; he lives very much in the moment; he has almost no materialist needs whatsoever; he trusts completely in his own instincts, he never lets go of his hope of finding love. This is why a scene involving a female doctor (Marie Seux) is so important; treating him with respect and empathy, when she attempts to examine him, he hugs her, and they hold each other for a moment, in an embrace that has nothing to do with sexuality and everything to do with kindness and emotional support.

Obviously, for a film of this nature to be in any way realistic, it must depict sexuality, and Vidal-Naquet doesn't hold back on that front. At the screening I attended, five people walked out within the first half-hour, by which time there had already been three graphic sex scenes (including a threesome with two prostitutes and a disabled man in a wheelchair). What's interesting about these scenes, however, is that they never lose their potency, irrespective of how many we see. I think the reason for this is how Vidal-Naquet presents them; far from filming them in a voyeuristic way or as titillation, they are instead presented dispassionately as something that happens to people in this line of work, as normal for Léo as taking drugs or sleeping rough - it's simply a part of his life.

Cinematographer Jacques Girault employs a pseudo-documentarian cinéma vérité aesthetic; the entire film is shot handheld, with an occasional loss of focus, frequent awkward compositions, and even losing the subject momentarily in the frame before picking him up again. This has the effect of neither depicting sexuality as something perverted and dirty, nor valorising it as the most important part of a relationship. By presenting it as simply a part of Léo's life, Vidal-Naquet normalises it. He certainly doesn't gloss over the problems of this kind of life, or the sexual perversions one may encounter, but he doesn't present sex work as, in and of itself, fundamentally immoral. Instead, he depicts both sides of the coin; from non-sexual intimacy with an elderly bookseller (Jean-Pierre Baste) who simply wants someone to read to him to a demeaning threesome with a couple (Nicolas Fernandez and Nicolas Chalumeau) who have Léo stand naked in front of them as they discuss how bad he smells, before roughly using a sex toy that would make even the ladies of LegalPorno winch. Indeed, Vidal-Naquet gets his point across about the highs and lows of sex work with a very simple edit - the film cuts from Léo lying peacefully in bed with the bookseller to giving a rough blowjob to a client in a car parked in an alley.

In terms of problems, as already stated, many will find the graphic sex scenes too much. Another issue is that Léo is an extremely passive character; he doesn't so much drive the plot as the plot depicts things that happen to him. Coupled with this, he doesn't have much of an arc, and at the end, he isn't overly different from the man we met at the beginning. With him being in every scene, almost every shot, the other prostitutes are very thinly sketched (even Ahd), but this is by design. On the other hand, the depiction of Claude (Philippe Ohrel), a magnanimous and kindly middle-aged man who takes a liking to Léo and immediately opens his home to him, is open to criticism; in a film founded on realism, he is something of a deus ex-machina, arriving in Léo's life just as he reaches his lowest point.

On paper, Sauvage should be a textbook case of misery porn, following as it does a homeless drug-addicted male prostitute and his often demeaning sexual encounters. However, Vidal-Naquet's non-judgemental depiction of Léo's occupation and milieu allows the more optimistic elements of his personality to rise to the surface, even in the face of seemingly endless degradations. It's certainly not an easy watch, but amidst the depravity, Vidal-Naquet finds moments of tenderness, moments which mean everything to Léo. Uninterested in titillation, the film depicts sexual activity as something that happens, without judgement or commentary. And by so doing, it avoids, for the most part, the clichés so inherent to films dealing with prostitution. Neither condemning Léo's lifestyle nor valorising it, no matter how demeaning or brutal it becomes, he always seems to find a way to keep going. That may be interpreted as tragic, but that's not the way Léo looks at himself, nor is it the way Vidal-Naquet wants us to look at him.

The main actor is a gem, in his performance there's only honesty and pureness. The character is somehow immersed in a difficult world, but as many critiques have already said: it's not paternalistic, cathartic or moralist about it. Leo doesn't seek redemption, help or anything beyond love. Sex work is just a tiny part of a very complex character; who is profoundly strong, naive and beautiful, almost dreamy. He's not the victim, he's a wounded soul who makes continuously bad choices, but the perplexing part to me it was the fact, that he seems at peace with himself and his actions, even at the end of the film. It is been a while since I have seen such a powerful film in terms of character complexity. It's definitely one of those films who won't leave you alone the moment you leave the cinema, it stays for a while in your mind and your heart. That my friends, it's the main point of art existing in the first place.

In another of my reviews I rated 'Theo and Hugo' as a gay film that was as close to perfection as possible. 'Sauvage' is as good, and objectively perhaps better. It also falls into the gay category. Or does it? As a gay man myself, I hate to say that this is a more widely themed film, but homophobia, which still exists as a curse within our society, will limit its appeal by putting it into what is offensively categorised as the 'gay' niche.

This is a masculine film and it depicts a group of male prostitutes who do not (want to) fall into the gay category. They may protect each other and form fierce ties, but their actual identities are as fluid as water. Leo, our main protagonist is basically gay, and when he loses the love of his life, who is a partner in prostitution, his precarious life unravels towards tragedy. He is romantic and can be gentle, but he is a broken person in a broken society. He did not choose to be broken, but his very nature, faced with the brutality that surrounds him, crushes his health and his inner resources. The ending has overwhelming power, as portrayed by Robert Bresson in 'Mouchette' and 'Au Hasard Balthazar'. This is not about choice, but the inevitability of the pain that society inflicts upon the more sensitive and gentle in our world. Leo's face at the end should move everyone to anger and tears.

The compassionate and also the more tortured aspects of the sexual world he is in are shown explicitly. Some were sickening and Leo was sickened by them. But, elderly gays are portrayed with more tenderness than younger gays, which is an about turn from other gay films, and for the better!

I was reminded also of Bunuel and the opening of 'L'Age d'Or'. The scorpions fight in this masculine environment, and the torturer in the car and the young couple with the monstrous sex toy are a disgrace even to the scorpions.

Last but not least, the film depicts homelessness and the human shame of a society that stands by, watches, and intervenes only when prodded. But like Bresson's gentle donkey Leo lays down his head to (perhaps) finally rest and I repeat, we see one of the most sublime scenes in cinema.

From the opening scenes you get a sense that this is not going to be comfortable viewing.. But who came here for a comfortable time ? The film is crafted with care, love, attention and most importantly respect. The themes are intense, chaotic and thought provoking giving us a real insight into the life of a gay sex worker. Through out the film there are tender even intimate moments admist the depravity we witness, this is due to the brilliant talent Maritaud who plays Leo, he plays Leo with so much empathy, honour and understanding.