France, 1998, 93 mins., color, French with English subtitles
French title: Seul Contre Tous
10am Dendy Cinemas, Martin Place, Sydney
Not quite Sunday morning material, but it played to a full audience, with the aisles crowded and people standing at the back - all keen to see what the controversy was about. They found out it's about an ex-horsemeat butcher who has just been released from prison, filled with hate and bitterness, he gets drunk, tries to pick fights with gays and blacks, fantasises about murdering his employer, punches his pregnant girlfriend in the belly not once, but 6 or 7 times, as her mother looks on frozen with terror. "I'm going to get the gun" she blurts out, giving away their last advantage. He takes the pistol, thinks about shooting them but leaves for Paris instead - back to the old neighbourhood, to unemployment, friends without money, homos and arabs, dingy hostels and one night stands with heroin-addicted whores.
The film is controversial for its brooding violence and sexual transgression. Incest, homophobia, wife-bashing, murder, suicide - it's all here. Loud gunshots accompany each jumpcut and camera lunge; accompanied by lurid intertitles making pseudo-intellectual statements about morality and mankind. The film's ending is postponed with a 30 second countdown so Noe can make his finale even more confronting and graphic, more shocking and controversial, and thereby, marketable.
Personally, I thought the film was a crude, cynical package that unjudiciously attempts to break every rule of political correctness as if it had some vital insight or philosophical wisdom to share. Noe's intertitles are vague rip-offs of Godard - they are pretentious, loud and disruptive, like inserting quotes of Nietzsche into an episode of COPS, they are absurdly trying to inject artistic integrity and mission into what is essentially an egotistical mouthpiece.
The use of gunshots to emphasise each move of the camera is fucking annoying too. Not only does Noe use character monologue and his ridiculous intertitles to preach injustice and social reform, but his gunshots are like a slap in the head. Don't slap me you bastard! Have some damn respect! For what it has to say, I Stand Alone lays in the boot a few too many times. Morally, this film is in the vein of bleak social realist films like Happiness, The Boys and Mike Leigh's Naked, however it lacks humour, and it tries so hard to be 100% prejudice and hate, pushing the argument that society is to blame as much as the fucked-up individual. While the film strives to involve the audience in this man's logic there is little identification - we don't so much get into his head as get the fucking point, already!
I Stand Alone is dreary sensationalist fare designed to provoke festival goers. In a normal cinema environment, with a paying audience drawn from different segments of society not just the hoi-polloi, I doubt many would enjoy it.
Giving the audience 30 seconds to leave the cinema before the ending was gratuitious and self-congratulatory. "Cinema is dead. You may call me a wanker in 30 seconds. Starting from ... now!" The final images of the film are accompanied by more unnecessary gunshots and the title: YOU HAVE BEEN WATCHING A GASPAR NOE FILM. The socialist sympathies expressed in the film are eclipsed by this climactic proclamation of authorship. The auteur's pride frames the film's transgressions as pure sensationalism. The effect is similar to that of American artist, Jeff Koon's floor-to-ceiling paintings of him and his wife fucking in various porn positions. The artist seeks shock and scandal, the audience is supposed to feel chided, but instead is irritated by the artist's conceit in thinking he can manipulate them so easily. I Stand Alone is about as original as a 12-inch dildo. The auteur wants us to know it's him shoving it down our throat, but his protagonist has already spilled the beans when he said "Go suck your own cock you fucking fairy."
Where the film does succeed is in building up so much tension that even I felt uncomfortable with what I was seeing. It also emphasises the importance of dignity. There is no point in living if you can't respect yourself. Money, work, friends and a little sex on the side go some way to providing meaning, but the most important thing is love - to not be alone. When this man loses it all, he begins to toy with suicidal and murderous fantasies - of fucking his daughter then shooting her and himself. But of course, Noe doesn't just suggest this outcome, he shows it and then backtracks, as if to say to the audience, "Just kidding! Don't be like that, it was *just* a joke! This is just a movie". It's a trick very similar to the false denouement of last years masochistic masterpiece Funny Games. The overall impression is of a smug filmmaker tossing moral biscuits at his audience as if we were Pavlov's dogs - grateful and salivating. This viewer was sickened but didn't learn anything new, except that a film so in love with its own conceits cannot possibly be truly social realist, or truly investigative. It becomes something more banal and bombastic.
eugene chew
comments? email the author
Return to Sydney Film Festival 1999 index