Actualités

New Wave godmother Agnès Varda has been laden with any number of honors and tributes in recent years, but she hasn’t received a better one, albeit indirectly so, than “Sauvage.” Even the title of Camille Vidal-Naquet’s tough but invigorating debut feature recalls the unmoored, asphalt-pounding energy of Varda’s seminal 1985 character study “Vagabond,” though the feral human subject here is a gay male prostitute, as hardened by the elements and the travails of his profession as he is vulnerable to them. Played with potent, unpredictable abandon by Félix Maritaud, he’s a protagonist you fear and fear for by turns, as he recklessly roams the streets, nightclubs and backwoods of Strasbourg in search of more than just the physical contact he’s freely selling. Though hardly revolutionary in form, the frank, sometimes violent queerness of its perspective makes his Cannes Critics’ Week entry genuinely bracing: Distributors inclined towards...