Seul contre tous
France,
1998, 93 min
Shown in 1999
CREDITS
- dir
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Gaspar Noé
- prod
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Gaspar Noé, Lucile Hadzihalilovic
- scr
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Gaspar Noé
- cam
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Dominique Colin
- editor
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Gaspar Noé, Lucile Hadzihalilovic
- cast
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Philippe Nahon, Blandine Lenoir, Frankye Pain, Martine Audrain
- source
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Strand Releasing, 1460 Fourth Street, Suite 302, Santa Monica, CA 90401 FAX: 310-395-2502. WORLD SALES- Celluloid Dreams, 24 rue Lamartine, 75009 Paris, France. FAX: 33-1-49-70-85-60. EMAIL: celluloid@i-t.FR
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COMMENTS
Gaspar Noé in person.
OTHER
Described as “the tragedy of a jobless butcher struggling to survive in the bowels of the country,” I Stand Alone is not for the faint of heart. Relentlessly squalid and deeply disturbing, this nightmare journey through the lower depths of French society is a descendant of Taxi Driver and Naked: It assaults the audience’s nervous system and moral assumptions like a blunt instrument. Winner of the Cannes Critics’ Week best film prize, the film takes a standard-issue alienated-outsider plot and pushes it beyond breaking point and into new realms of nihilism and transgressive sentiment. Noé’s excruciatingly determinist narrative charts the downward spiral of a dispossessed, unreconcilably antisocial man who imparts his crude, bleak worldview through a relentless voiceover, articulating a profoundly ugly vision of life oozing with misogyny, racism and psychosexual disgust. Made on a miniscule budget over four years, the film’s deliberate, wide-screen compositions and shot durations reveal a rigorous cinematic intelligence. This lumpen-existential doomfest deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Gummo, Satantango and Bad Lieutenant. But these films pale in comparison to its unrelieved catalogue of obscenity and degradation whose convulsive payoff leaves horror and pity vying for the last word.
—Gavin Smith
FACTOID #27
A surrealist stop-motion animator, the Czech Jan Svankmajer, was the first recipient of the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award in 1997. The POV Award honors the lifetime achievement of a filmmaker who works outside of feature-length narrative filmmaking.
