I Stand Alone
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Movie Reviews of I Stand Alone
Movie Review: a tough view but for a reason
Summary: 5 Stars
This film is not for everyone. It is for adults who are willing to look closely at the uglier side of human nature. Noe runs a warning with about 20 minutes to go, giving you a chance to leave the theater in anticipation of an upcoming display of horrific violence. Of course, this is somewhat of a sick joke because up to that point, you will have been subjected to over an hour of being captive to and pummelled by the rambling disconnected thoughts and acts of a misanthropic angry increasingly desperate human being hitting bottom.
Just to address a thread which seem to run through the reviews (I suppose there might be thematic spoilers here depending on your standards though I will speak generally): yes, there are a few brief moments of very explicit physical violence in this film. The film is not, however, meant for those who look forward to seeing acts of violence as some sort of thrill (and I don't really mean that to sound as judgmental as it might come across as I can be one of those people on any given day). The main acts of violence here, directed against women, are meant to display the depths to which the butcher has been reduced by his feelings of helplessness as he has been unempowered by society: no job, no refuge of home, no love through companionship, no real purpose other than surviving, other than attempting to validate his existence on the planet somehow; so he lashes out at the targets he can, the ones who are defenseless and easy. Some people will have a hard time stomaching these scenes and will be revolted, but properly so: they are meant to horrify and disgust you. If you cannot handle things like this, just don't watch this film; the scenes are essential to it and you can't just skip them and really have seen this movie. The trick here is that Noe lets us in on the running interior dialogue of this man unraveling and dares us to feel superior, to feel like we are not capable of supreme ugliness if luck were to go against us. The butcher's rage against society is marred by pettiness, arrogance, self-pity, and by an inability to gather up the strength to strike out at the ones who have really reduced him to what he is; an inability to fix a world that is so vastly beyond the scope and control of any single individual. So he must displace: he rambles about how France has fallen, targets minorities in his mind, has explosions of anger over the smallest and most inconsequential of things, his mind jumping from coherent thoughts to crazy ones, and mixing real grievances with completely false ones. He fantasizes about paying back those who really caused him injustices; and yet, those plans for vengeance are continually falling apart, under the futility of ever really being able to lash out at so many unreachable targets. Noe doesn't give you the cathartic moment that many such "man in despair" films give you; there is no real payback here to give you a surrogate moment of relief, that justice can be achieved. The butcher only dreams of having that kind of satisfaction in an effort to keep himself going. Noe instead throws you a completely different curveball in the ending, which is simultaneously moving, completely appalling, pitiful, and strangely in a way even rather uplifting, as horrible as the conclusion is. When the butcher finally relents close to the end and breaks down and cries, turning his anger against himself as a failure, it is heartwrenching, a great performance by Nahon. And the butcher's final thoughts, as wrongheaded as they will (I certainly hope!) strike you, are meant to make you think hard about how a human being is to find emotional meaning once the rules of civilized life have become irrelevant because you have no hope of success, no chance to be a winner as society has rigged things.
A lot of people have complained about this film and Irreversible, that Noe is something of a sensationalist charlatan. Both films share a fondness for aggressively attention-drawing formal gimmicks and both films do hit the audience quite hard with the details of the grotesqueries they depict. I support Noe's work in these films because I think we've become so jaded that in order to get us to really feel ill at ease, to question, to react, some extreme techniques are warranted. A lot of people have grown quite comfortable in this world denying the horrors that go on around us, keeping them marginalized in boxes outside our minds, and being provoked like this has its purposes and reasons. And a lot of people have desensitized themselves to everpresent death and to violence, justifying their part in civil society by notions of punishment, vengeance and deserving fate. You could certainly just decide that you don't need to be so provoked, that you are quite self-aware of your limits and how sensible you would be under moments of crisis and anger, that you grasp how and where violence in society is acceptable and where it is not. If so, I guess you don't need to be seeing movies like this.
Movie Review: Cinema Of Humanity, Cinema Of Brutality
Summary: 5 Stars
Lille, Northern France, 1980: Fleeing a life of poverty, drudgery, custodial incarceration, as well as a failed marriage and an emotionally disturbed daughter, a middle-aged, penniless butcher (Philippe Nahon) leaves Paris and settles in Lille with the owner of the café in which he used to work (who is also pregnant with his child). The butcher and his girlfriend, being without funds, move into the claustrophobic apartment of the girlfriend's elderly mother. As time passes and the butcher fails to secure work in the recession-blighted climate, the latent, barely suppressed anger which he feels toward the world and his increasingly emasculative girlfriend builds to a crescendo and eventually explodes into violence. Armed with a handgun, fermenting in anger, and resolving to live life purely on his own terms from hereon out, the butcher flees Lille and heads back to Paris and a horrifying appointment with destiny...
A theatrical sequel to his short film, "Carne", Gaspar Noe's "I Stand Alone" is one of the most confrontational, transgressive pieces of cinema that you're ever likely to see; it is a scarifying hymn of anger, resentment and despair sung by a man whose life has spun out of control due to a combination of poverty, unfortunate circumstance and his own pugnacious, bucolic temperament. Noe broadsides the viewer with a non-stop, almost stream-of-consciousness litany of anger, invective and cynicism as we listen to the butcher's thoughts in voice-over as the windows of opportunity in his life close one-by-one. The soundtrack is a bombardment of gunshots and slab-like synth tones which accompany smash-cuts which separate scenes, shots, zooms and Godardian captions. That said, Noe's film is emphatically NOT an exercise in gratuitous excess for the sake of it. It is a deeply affecting portrait of the members of an underclass who have been marginalised and downtrodden by the rapacious, venal nature of consumer capitalism. People quite literally exist as little more than currency in this hard-scrabble landscape and, depressingly, it is a world which is all too recognisable in today's recession-blighted times.
Philippe Nahon, a stalwart of contemporary French cinema, quite literally gives the performance of a lifetime as "the butcher" and it is a testament to his strength as an actor (as well as Noe as a director) that he turns a character who could have been an abhorrent caricature in less skilled hands into an existential anti-hero with an alarming insight into humanity; in Nahon's hands, "the butcher" really is the heir apparent to Genet and Celine's protagonists. The thoughts that he vocalises about the world may be unpalatable to many people, but one cannot deny that there is more than a grain of truth to many of them. If you've ever been unemployed, marginalised, downtrodden or mistreated, you cannot help but relate to at least some of what he says; literally, if you've ever been there, you'll understand where he's coming from - even if you can't empathise with or condone the shockingly transgressive actions that close the film.
"I Stand Alone" is an uncompromising piece of cinema. It is a film about one man's descent into a deeply shocking and transgressive sense of morality as a response to a world which has rejected him and which is riven with cruelty, hypocrisy and brutality. Ultimately and despite its deeply shocking content, it is also a film about empathy, love and humanity - albeit one that is a million miles removed from the saccharine-coated, cookie-cutter sensibilities perpetuated in the majority of western cinema.
To my mind, "I Stand Alone" (along with Noe's other deeply controversial and similarly brilliant film, Irreversible) is one of the most important films of the last twenty years and it is for this reason that I recommend it unreservedly for those who have the stomach to engage with it's bleak vision.
Movie Review: Psychotic mania 101
Summary: 5 Stars
Many, many spoilers here!!!!
It took me over 2 years to watch this film after having purchased it. I had seen Irreversible, and was actually afraid of seeing this movie because of not knowing what to expect. Anyway, I loved it. It rings so true to the thoughts of most of us... truly, we see in his racing thoughts the angry mentality that takes over us when the social structure conspires to crush our spirits. Unemployed, in a relationship with an ugly demanding woman (who has furthered the walls around him by carrying his child), away from the only person he loves (his daughter), aging with nothing to show for it, flat broke, and immersed in a system only preoccupied with appeasing the rich and ostracizing the poor. Of course it generates anger, and the blame definitely needs to be attributed to someone. Now, in the case of our friend, he shows very strongly how information overload leads to stagnation, it almost becomes a matter of survival for him to turn life into something monochromatic, some action of his must be undertaken in order to effectively change. Playing the game according to the system has failed him. The movie has a lot of inner dialog, and if you're like me and don't speak French, you will be reading very quickly. This definitely reflects the manic state he is in; he concretely projects his aggression into external objects, and takes action accordingly (seen when he kills his unborn child still in the womb). It unravels into a psychotic state when he becomes delusional about what he needs to do in order to save himself and his handicapped daughter. They must both die so they can truly be free, so they can truly fuse as one. At this point an advisory notice comes onto the screen, stating you have 30 seconds to leave the screening. This is definitely anxiety-provoking for anyone. What follows is definitely disturbing. His daughter is shot from behind, the bullet hole piercing through her neck and she lies on the floor writhing, bleeding from the orifice, resembling the slaughtering of a cow or horse (the image that came to me was of the horse at the beginning of Carne), and he as well states that animals usually die faster, and he can't stand to see her suffer like that. The analogy to irrational beasts is more evident with the fact that she does not speak, thus contorts and dies as a nonverbal creature would. The concreteness of his outside projections becomes more limited, and he decides killing the man who didn't give him a job was less important than carrying out the main plan. In essence, by reenacting his past profession (and thus the definition of his life) in that moment, he literally kills off the 2 key aspects of his existence to date with the 2nd shot (he destroys the image of the slaughtered contorting animal, which he can no longer stand to watch; and he kills his daughter, his link to happiness, and the only thing truly keeping him in this world). Thus, she is shot in the head. He deliberates for a long time before turning the gun on himself and committing suicide, thus destroying the 2nd part of his psyche, the castrated version of himself that no longer has any real reason to remain alive. Eventually we see this was all engendered by his imagination, and he decides to seek the so-called fusion with his daughter in a sublimated form, having sex, a more attractive alternative which also allows psychic survival. After this, there is something of a reverse Oedipal role, she is the mother-figure consoling the crying baby, and the boundaries of the forbidden incestuous relationship are shattered, thus he can find peace. All in all, an excellent film. Don't compare it to Irreversible, they have exceedingly distinct messages.. there do seem to be allusions to it (many references to tunnels) as well as to Noe's new film in the mentioning of the great void of death. Highly recommended, this man is a genius.
Movie Review: The Revolution eats its Young
Summary: 5 Stars
Ever seen Goya's depraved little hellscape "Saturn Devouring his Children"?
Oh sure you have. It is the very fabric of nightmare, that painting: Saturn shrouded in inky darkness, down on his knees, rending and wolfing down a bloody, pulpy thing that an instant before had been his child.
Now is it coming back to you? Consider the face of that Mad, Terrible God: its features contorted in a rictus of unquenchable lunatic appetite, the eyes reeling in their distended sockets, the massive, fleshy hands rending and tearing the sacred flesh before Old Father Kronos takes a bloody bite, shivery with the joy of violation.
That's the stark, primeval, hungry terror of Goya's depiction of the ancient story of Kronos, who devoured his own brood lest they supplant him. No doubt our shaggy caveman forebears whispered that shivery tale in grunts around their cooking fires, but until Goya, the unspeakable vileness of the Devouring had never been slathered up on a gallery wall---not before, and not since.
Until now.
Gaspar Noe's "Seul Contre Tous" (really "Alone against All", though oddly translated as "I Stand Alone") hurls a slab of maggoty meat deep down into the Ogre's cave, and his Butcher (incomparably made real by Phillipe Nahon) comes hulking up from his slumber, hungry for blood and revenge.
Most of all revenge. Does he get it?
Noe is a film-making madman & bomb-lobber, and he has created something deeply feral and astonishing with "Seul Contre Tous". The result: a kind of cinematic blowtorch, prepped all white-hot, with which he lulls the viewer---Noe is only going to flip the infernal thing on and off.
That's when he shoves the fiery thing up the viewer's a**, all 80 butane-belching pounds of it.
So: we are airlifted at terminal velocity into the Butcher's own bleak personal Hell, into which he has been vomited from Prison, to which he was consigned after mangling a man he mistakenly thought had raped his mentally retarded daughter.
The Butcher has lost everything: his life, his profession, his honor, his butcher shop, which is now run (profitably) by Arabs. He abandons his daughter to an institution in Paris, and flees for Britanny with his corpulent mistress, who tempts him with the promise to finance a new store, and binds him with the child---his child---in her belly.
The frenetic narration, the jarring, frenzied jump-cuts (accompanied by small sonic booms), and the crazed martial music imposed over a blood-red map of France (denoted, "F!") suggest a military campaign: and indeed, this is a War, this is a Revolution, of the bleakest, most depraved, most barbaric kind. Our Butcher finds himself in the streets, with a gun and three bullets, on a mission to the guts of Paris to---um, rescue?---his daughter.
The Butcher becomes his own Revolution, his own Kronos: and all Revolutions, all Godheads, demand payment in human blood. Can we hope for a happy ending?
To say more would be to ruin your quality time with the Monster, to give you the key to the labyrinth while the Minotaur was out. I won't. The movie is almost sublimely bleak and hellish, Nahon is stunning as the roving tormented soul with a gun, and Noe keeps everything stark and well-lit, so you have to look, particularly when the Ogre is ready to eat.
Which is why Goya's cannibalistic vision is less shocking than Noe's: Goya had the taste---or mercy?---to shroud everything in inky darkness. Noe keeps the house lights up, and his sets are all garishly lit, like a porno flick.
You have been warned.
JSG
Movie Review: the butcher; alone against all
Summary: 5 Stars
The movie about the butcher who has lost it all is an impressive venture into an eloquent narrative about despair, and most of all, loneliness. In a way, the topic can be considered immature, a little too much of the teenage in anguish sort of dialogue, but it is just so well conceived in regards to Noé's particular cinematic vision that it becomes a powerful tale of one man's abandonment to his pathologies and to the inevitable decay of society.
There is something about Gaspar Noé's films -perhaps a certain quality of grotesquery and exaggerated reality, or his fixation with certain pieces of classical music- that somehow manages to inflict pain into the viewer. When you see the color in the film, that sort of yellowish or reddish accent, that sickly overtone in embellished color, you are being set up visually for the entrapment of narrative, plot and ideas. Then add to that, a story of an undeniable pathetic element, and you are in for an experience, no matter what you end up thinking of the film.
If you have already seen his following film, `Irreversible', you might know what to expect from Noé. When I first got a hold of this film, I had a very ambiguous feeling, one that oscillated from unease to curiosity, and this because of having watched Irreversible. The film does deliver a fair amount of extremely well crafted shock value, just to jolt your senses, in way, to create a final paroxysm for the tension that the butcher's monologue of despair has been creating through out the film. The end is hard to watch but it doesn't come off as unnecessary violence. It is more of a whirlwind of the extreme despair of the butcher. Irreversible ends up as more of a shocker because the rape scene is just so long and perverse.
But more than anything, shocks aside, the story presents us with a very interesting look of how a man can let himself go and just give in to his altered state of mind. This is exemplified beautifully in the relation between the butcher and his daughter. As with irreversible, Noé works here with a fairly simple story, and a very simple axiom. In this case, for example, it is an examination of morality and man as a measure for it. When a man is distraught is all society to blame, or is it time for this man to abandon society by any means?
If you are looking for a disturbing movie with eloquent dialogue, in this case a monologue, and that is a well made film, this is one of them. This film may be criticized more than other disturbing films since it is so well made and this causes it to be more intrusive; it has the elements of a reality somewhat possible in the lives of everyone, as was irreversible. It doesn't create the fear that irreversible creates, or the feeling of lost safety; it creates something different, yet on the same level as both the fear and insecurity in irreversible. It is of course to be viewed by very different standards of those used to watch a disturbing film by Ingmar Bergman, or the way you view a Tarkovsky or a Bresson or a Lynch or a Miike film. The point is, Noé definitely has a unique cinematic voice, and although it is a voice in development, it is a very powerful one and he needs no comparison to other filmmakers. As does Irreversible, the film ends with a passage of classical music that accentuates the bittersweetness of the finale. Another very good reason to watch this film, is the choice of actors used to play the characters in the film. The vision of the butcher seems to correspond to the world since it is the case that the people who inhabit it show that same decay in their expressions.