Avis Metacritic

Gut-punchingly authentic with radiant moments of tenderness where least expected, intimate yet not voyeuristic, this first feature by writer-director Camille Vidal-Naquet gets the balance between looking-for-love and settling-for-sensation exactly right.

Sauvage captures the multitude of emotion or lack of, that come with Leo’s tricks. There’s jealousy, pain, excitement, cruelty and even monotonous apathy where you’d least expect it.

There are fleeting moments of wit, bliss and even tenderness amid the gritty severity, as Vidal-Naquet perceptively portrays not just the lonely, drug-fueled rigors of the hustler lifestyle, but the simultaneously competitive and supportive fraternal community that sustains it.

Sauvage is often difficult viewing, and Leo tries our patience and compassion as anyone habitually treating themselves so poorly can. Nevertheless, the film achieves a sort of grace, in moments of sweetness and stillness, when the fullness of Leo’s being—be it ravaged and weary—is palpable and, finally, undeniable.

This is a sexually frank and arrestingly tender perspective of a young man in freefall. It occasionally leans too far into the horrors of street prostitution, but it’s mostly an open-minded view of its shiftless main character.

From its title on down, Sauvage / Wild is a film that’s torn between different translations of the same basic principle — one soft and the other hard. There’s no judgement of him whatsoever, to the point where it sometimes feels like the character is more of a construct than he is a fully dimension person of flesh and blood.

The film is a tale about how those who spiral so far out of control become blind, if not immune, to the severity of their symptoms.

Sauvage has its longueurs, at times seeming stuck in a circuitous groove with too little forward momentum. However, the movie is never banal. It's a fully inhabited world that pulls us in.

What is interesting about Sauvage is that it shows how savagely boring Leo’s life is, quite a lot of the time.

A film which frequently falls back on contrived, conventional storytelling at odds its with its body-and-soul immersion into the physical and emotional toll of life on the game.