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BACK
Gaspar Noe's first full-length feature is a
genuine shocker. It's a sequel to his 40-minute Carne, a film that
didn't do much for me when it played the film-festival circuit in the
early 90s, though I wouldn't mind seeing it again now. This feature is
called Seul contre tous, which translates literally as "alone
against everybody"; I Stand Alone is cornier but rolls more easily
off the tongue.
You don't need to know anything about Carne to follow or
appreciate I Stand Alone--which thoughtfully provides a precis of
Carne in its opening minutes--but some familiarity with Taxi
Driver or any of its spin-offs might help you experience its full
wallop. Like Martin Scorsese's film, I Stand Alone centers on an
armed and enraged loner who spews macho, racist, and homophobic bile--most
of which he mutters to himself--and is ready to mow down everyone in
sight. The movie is as much inside his head as Taxi Driver was
inside Travis Bickle's, so that a great deal of what we see and think is
filtered through the hero's offscreen narration. But the differences
between the films are so striking it's difficult not to read Noe's movie
as a deconstruction of Taxi Driver--an ideological unpacking of its
glamour and romance, an exposure of its lies.
Noe gives us an unnamed French
butcher in his early 50s (craggy
Philippe Nahon) rather than an American cabbie in his mid-20s (lanky
Robert De Niro), a series of offscreen gunshots and plucked notes to
replace a swanky Bernard Herrmann score, and an exceptionally grisly urban
plot about unemployment, abject violence, and incestuous delirium to
replace Paul Schrader's rhapsody about existential and excremental urban
anguish. But if Scorsese's brilliant illustration of Schrader's script
ultimately made mass murder seem sexy, Noe's direction of his own script
rubs our noses in the ugliest implications of our Pavlovian identification
with his hero--and obliges us to choke on our own saliva. Movies don't get
much darker than this, because few of them have as much to say about
what movies coax us into doing to ourselves.
Put more simply, I Stand Alone is a movie that removes your
head, fucks with it for a while, and then hands it back to you. I wonder
what the late Samuel Fuller--perhaps the filmmaker most interested in
hatred and how it functions--would have made of it.
***
There are two very violent scenes, one near the beginning and one near
the end, and women are the victims in both. Yet the feeling of violence in
the movie is nearly constant, thanks to the way the narrative is
constructed. Violence is present in the butcher's stream-of-consciousness
narration--most of it a torrential rant of complaint, abuse, and
negativity driven by a xenophobic virulence that restores a sense of
obscenity to language (no mean feat given the current climate). And it's
felt in every punctuating offscreen gunshot and plucked note, which is
usually accompanied by an abrupt and jarring cut or camera movement. These
percussive bursts place the butcher's imagined violence on an equal plane
with the much rarer bursts of violence we actually see and the still rarer
violent acts he commits rather than imagines he commits. Every time we
hear a gunshot or a sudden plucked note, our reflexes tell us that the
threat of violence has just been carried out--until we realize that it's
only been imagined, by the butcher and therefore by us. By the end of the
film--which offers two horrific conclusions, neither of which may be
"true"--it's apparent that our imagination and the butcher's are not only
difficult to separate from each other but virtually impossible to
distinguish from the events of the story.
At the same time, the shift of camera position that often accompanies
the explosive bursts gives a sense of aesthetic violence, implying that
the story and our perception of it is every bit as vulnerable to Noe's
formally aggressive tactics as human flesh is vulnerable to bullets. It's
the kind of ongoing metaphor one experiences in the gut as much as in the
mind, and a considerable portion of Noe's art consists of propounding this
metaphor and explaining what it means in as many ways as possible. What's
being demonstrated, one might say, is the fascism of art as well as the
art of fascism--the perverse ways in which Noe's project coincides with
that of his hero.
We don't even need the butcher for this strategy to be set in motion.
The movie opens with a flaming red map of France emblazoned with a giant F
and plunked in the middle of the 'Scope frame, followed by the word
"morality" and then the word "justice" filling the screen. (Rumor has it
that Noe originally wanted to call this movie France.) Then we see
a man pontificating in a bar, saying, "Do you know what morality is?" and
brandishing his gun by way of an answer: "Here is my justice."
Only after this do we get the credits, then the butcher offers his own
bio in third person over a series of snapshots. Born near Paris in 1939,
abandoned by his mother two years later. Discovers at six that his father
was a French communist killed in a German death camp. Learns his trade at
14, sets up shop in Aubervilliers at 30, selling horse meat. Two years
later he screws a virgin at the Hotel of the Future, across the street
from the factory where she works. Nine months later a girl named Cynthia
is born, and the mother abandons her and the butcher soon afterward.
Cynthia grows up mute and apparently retarded, and her father becomes
sexually attracted to her when she reaches puberty. When her first period
starts, she heads for her father's shop; en route a worker tries to seduce
her, but a neighbor intervenes. Spotting blood on her skirt, the butcher
assumes she's been raped, runs out in a blind rage, and stabs an innocent
worker in the face. He winds up in jail, and Cynthia is placed in an
institution.
By the time he gets out of jail, the butcher has lost his shop. He goes
to work at a bar, becoming the matron's lover and getting her pregnant.
She proposes selling the bar, moving with him to her mother's flat in a
Lille suburb, and leasing a meat market. He accepts, but after she fails
to lease a market, he grows rancorous and frustrated, especially after
he's fired from a job at a deli because he refuses to smile. (It's now
early 1980, when the remainder of the story takes place, and the film
shifts from past to present tense.)
Still somewhat guilt ridden about abandoning his daughter, he works as
a night watchman at a rest home, and one night is summoned by a nurse who
reminds him of Cynthia to assist a dying woman. Soon afterward he attends
a porn film, comes home late, and winds up exchanging insults with his
pregnant lover until he explodes in rage and starts kicking and punching
her in the stomach, causing a miscarriage--the first of the film's two
very violent scenes, and the only one presented as incontrovertibly real.
The woman's mother threatens to get a gun, and the butcher forces her to
tell him where it is so he can take it with him when he leaves, hitching a
ride to northern Paris.
From this point on the movie enters a realm of thematic, linguistic,
and aesthetic brutality that continues more or less unabated until the
end. One thing the butcher says to his battered mistress should suffice as
an example: "Your baby's hamburger meat; he lucked out not having to look
at your lying face." And by the end of the film his cascading offscreen
monologue has become so frantic and conflicted an additional voice is
needed to articulate it (the film also credits a narrator, Olivier Doran).
Just about the only verifiable events that we witness are the butcher
looking despondently for work, hunting up a few old friends, nursing a few
grudges, spending most of his remaining money (about $60), and finally
going to see Cynthia at the institution, leaving with her, and checking
into the Hotel of the Future, where the two of them wind up in the same
room where she was conceived. That's enough to make the movie feel charged
with potential violence at practically every moment, because by this time
the character seems sufficiently monstrous, desperate, and bitter to be
capable of anything, and the violence of both his offscreen language and
the offscreen gunshots has established his imagination (and ours) as being
every bit as potent as anything we've seen.
***
I have no idea why Noe chose to plant his story in 1980 rather than the
present. But I suspect the political climate of France during that
period--when, among other things, Le Pen emerged as a political force--had
something to do with his decision. The images of downtrodden
humanity, the precise iconography of cruddy working-class interiors (the
wallpaper and kitschy art, the dirty mirrors and naked light
fixtures)--all captured as precisely and acutely as their American period
equivalents in Leonard Kastle's The Honeymoon Killers (1970)--could
be found in any period in France over the past three decades, so I suspect
Noe had something more specific in mind. His command of his actors,
anamorphic 16-millimeter camera, sound, and editing is so awesome it's
hard to believe that any of his choices is arbitrary.
As for his moral agenda, I'm not convinced by his various
pronouncements in interviews that even he has a clear understanding of
what it is. I'm more inclined to go with D.H. Lawrence's directive to
trust the tale and not the teller. It's a tale with two endings--one of
them tragic, culminating in murder and suicide, and the other "happy,"
culminating in sex and romance--and the movie essentially dares you to
pick which one you prefer. Whichever choice you make, the movie forces you
to squirm at the implications of your preference. This apparently drove
one of my New York colleagues so crazy she wound up describing the second
conclusion as the "most redemptive" ending in a film since Robert
Bresson's Pickpocket, a remark that startled me as much as anything
in Noe's film. For one thing, it conjures up a surrealist image of a
redemption race in which all potentially redemptive films since
Pickpocket leave the starting gate at the same time and only one is
declared the winner. For another, it manages to postulate as comparable
forms of redemption an incarcerated pickpocket's recognition of his love
for his girlfriend, expressed through the bars of his cell to the strains
of Jean-Baptiste Lully, and the butcher's rationalization of having sex
with his own daughter, delivered to the strains of syrupy pseudo-Baroque
music.
Admittedly, movies are open to all sorts of readings, but if this one
is proposing incest as a form of redemption it must have lost me early on.
That its leading character makes such a proposal, and that the film
invites one to identify with him, is precisely what makes it such an
infernal machine: it's designed to tell us things about ourselves that we
may not want to know. If all movies lie to us in one way or another--from
the illusion of movement given by individual frames to more complex
fantasies--then it might be argued that the most truthful among them are
the ones that help us understand what they're doing and what we're doing
as a consequence. This is a movie that tells me something about fascism,
and then makes me pay for that knowledge.