Seul contre tous

'I Stand Alone' goes where few movies dare these days. It presents a portrait of hatred, disgust, despair and nihilism. Many would probably not like to face up to the fact that people like "The Butcher" exist in our society, but they do. By ignoring them we compound the problems they present and represent.

Philippe Nahon plays a middle aged unemployed French butcher who is trapped in a loveless relationship with his pregnant girlfriend (Frankye Pain). She has some money and uses it as a power trip, promising to set him up with a new shop. When that doesn't eventuate he attacks her in a fit of rage, and leaves with a gun and three bullets. He heads back to Paris with no money and no prospects. As he sinks lower and lower into hopelessness his anger intensifies, and his mind races with fantasies of violence and revenge.

This is a confronting and profoundly disturbing movie, mainly because of it's realism and believability. While it certainly features some scenes of extreme violence, and one scene of explicit pornography (blurred in the print I watched), most of what makes it so powerful and horrible is the almost non-stop venomous monologues of "The Butcher". Director Gaspar Noe self consciously apes Scorsese's 'Taxi Driver' in several scenes, but this movie is a truly original vision. Highly recommended for movie buffs with strong stomachs, and the ability to deal with dark and troubling material.

Gaspar Noë's first full-length film seeks to provide, and sometimes achieves, an elegantly bleak picture of the world through the eyes of a French butcher whose life has been devolving from day one. The film begins as a kind of quick documentary life, narrated over still photos with the voice-over of the butcher, played by Philippe Nahon. From here forward the voice never leaves us, moving relentlessly forward with its declarations of gloom and anger. The narrator's negativism commands our attention and even our respect because of its intensity and clarity. Perhaps this man is just a depressive, a hopeless loser. But his anger and his articulateness command attention and create an irresistible and memorable voice -- a voice quite reminiscent of the writings of Louis-Ferdinand Céline ("Journey to the End of the Night," "Death on the Installment Plan"), who like Noë's protagonist was a nihilist, fascist, and anti-Semite, and likewise shocked with his bluntness of expression. Set in 1980, the story of "I Stand Alone"/"Seul contre tous" may also be meant to reflect the thinking of a certain French underclass of that time whose desperation and resentment toward growing minorities in the country and toward the rich and the liberal bourgeoisie led them to rally behind the far right political leader Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Philippe Nahon is strong in the central role. Indeed one can hardly imagine anybody else playing it. But all the characters Nahon interacts with tend to be little more than static cameos. There are even moments when we are not sure they exist, or when his declarations seem like fantasies, and this uncertainty undermines the otherwise forceful narrative. Unfortunately also the film tends to disintegrate into excess verbiage and alternative finales in its last chapters. The nonstop narration has seemed to work well up to then, but when Noë resorts to an overlapping second voice and approaches the father's sexual violation of his daughter through panning off into the street, the voice-over becomes a wall preventing us from experiencing what's been dealt with and the hitherto blunt manner -- the obscene slangy language and the gun-shot blast divisions of images and the boldly declarative intertitles (Noë is of the nothing-succeeds-like-excess school of film-making) -- comes to seem a bit of a facade. As in the later "Irréversible" it seems as though the director's desire to shock and exploit ingenious and attention-getting cinematic techniques is greater than his willingness to develop a story and characters in depth. Nonetheless there are strong signs of a bold and original talent on display here, and of an independent point of view.

The respected critic Jonathan Rosenbaum went overboard when he classified "I Stand Alone" as a "masterpiece." Noë strives so hard to achieve profundity he dupes himself into the certain conviction that he has achieved it. Whether "I Stand Alone" will stand the test of time is a question only time, not Noë or Rosenbaum, can decide.

The film is not particularly well served by a Strand Leasing DVD providing a slightly blurry print and no extras. The Menu design however is rather handsome.

Watched on Netflix DVD November 2005.

Stunning. The writer-director Gaspar Noe's first-person account of a jobless butcher's trip on the down escalator has a lot of superficial resemblances to TAXI DRIVER, but the real unseen hand behind this shattering picture belongs to Louis-Ferdinand Celine, whose scabrous stream-of-consciousness monologues Noe has translated into scorching, nineties angry-white-man-ese. As the butcher's three hundred francs dwindle, and his handgun starts looking more and more appealing, Noe surgically implants us inside the antihero's head using a cascade of hilarious and horrifying nihilistic rants that don't quite resemble anything you've ever heard in a movie.

Noe's ingenuity in reinventing the subjective style of TAXI DRIVER is near-limitless; his array of techniques dazzles, from the Godardian intertitles that break the action like a butcher's cleaver hammering a wooden cutting board, to the deafening gunshots accompanied by digital pans and zooms that throw a Brechtian bucket of icewater on the proceedings whenever they calm down. At times the picture suggests one of Fassbinder's fatalistic fables staged as a William Castle horror movie; in a stroke of genius, Noe conceives of the inevitable crack-up finale not in terms of some novel spin on the image, but as a blizzard of scurrilous language--a head self-narrating to the implode point.

At times, the butcher's and Noe's nihilism seem to be one--and a posturing, collegiate nihilism it can be. And the penultimate section of the movie thunks along as Noe recreates painfully familiar scenes from TAXI DRIVER almost in toto. But the cumulative effect of the movie is lacerating, the way early Scorsese and Toback must have felt the first time out. French-language cinema hasn't gotten this kind of wake-up call since the (lesser) MAN BITES DOG.

The movie shocked me, it made me feel sad, sorry and ashamed.

It shows how a potentially good human being can become bad due to the lack of love in our society. Society and it's egoism, loneliness, selfishness, and individualism affect all humans. Some more than others. This movie is a rather extreme example, but it is definitely what is needed to shake you and make this world a better place.

Some might interpret it as a useless display of bitterness and turn their head to keep on living their "comfortable" lives. Probably most will do that by fear of confronting such a terrible reality. With that attitude nothing will change.

I see the main's characters attitude as the natural consequence of a society without love, a society where everything is given in exchange of something (natural consequence of capitalism). Unfortunately people living afraid and with no love are everywhere. Their acts are a consequence of the extreme individualism and lack of interest of human beings towards others, hence the lack of care for themselves, hence the lack of love.

"Life is a selfish act". Unfortunately our society, or in other words ourselves, act selfishly. As long as that keeps on going the world will be a sad, boring and lonely place.

I have faith in humanity and in living in a world of care, respect, tolerance and responsibility towards the rest. Unfortunately we still have a looooong way to go.

I recommend it to everyone, specially the ones who do not like facing reality and prefer living in "comfort". They need it more than anyone. I give it a well merited 10.

Following the life of the most disaffected, disillusioned, alienated, resentful, hostile and unbalanced middle aged man that has ever carried an image on a screen - but is he alone, and can all the factors he believes brought him to this nadir of all nadirs actually be correct, that there was little or nothing to be done, with the cards he was dealt as a child, the hands he had to play during his formative years, set in stone, to fatefully be performed in only one way, as unsatisfying an existence that could ever have walked this earth, beaten by the state, society, its structures and its rules.

You won't come away with a smile on your face, or at least not until you realise that there's always someone worse off than yourself. A painful watch at times, but it comes with the director's territory.