Main Cast: Philippe Nahon, Frankye Pain, Blandine Lenoir, Martine Audrain
Release Year: 1998
Country: FR
Run Time: 81 minutes
Plot
In this French drama, Gaspar Noe, who won awards (Prix Georges Sadoul, Cannes Crix Week) for his 40-minute Carne (1991), continues where that film ended, beginning with a Carne recap: The Butcher (Philippe Nahon) narrates, telling how, as a war orphan working at 14, he opened his horsemeat butcher shop and fathered a mute, retarded daughter. After the mother and daughter left for life in a Paris suburb, he served a prison term after an assault on someone he mistakenly believed had raped his daughter. The follow-up sequel, set in a Lille suburb, begins in 1980: Obese bar owner (Franjkyie Pain) is pregnant by The Butcher, who is unable to find work. The couple moves in with her mother, but he becomes irritated with the two women and goes to Paris where the humiliation of job-hunting and the sum total of futility and hopelessness triggers thoughts of what he might accomplish with his gun and his last three bullets. Shown at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Bhob Stewart, All Movie Guide
Review
A grim portrait of disaffection and loneliness, Gaspar Noe's I Stand Alone is a movie clearly conceived to make a stir. With an armed, frustrated, and hate-filled time bomb at its center, it unabashedly recalls Taxi Driver, offering its own nihilistic spin on Martin Scorsese's masterpiece of urban anomie and redemption. For a feature debut, it's unbelievably daring. Noe doesn't shy away from sprucing up his familiar story with Godard-ian flourishes, including occasional intertitles, a torrent of offscreen narration, and even a warning to the audience to leave before the wrenching finale. A more jarring conceit is the frequent use of abrupt cuts and fast dollies, accompanied by gunshots on the soundtrack. Genuinely startling and somewhat misconceived, the distracting device nonetheless goes some way toward evoking the volatile mindset of the protagonist. The movie shines a light on the circumstances that breed fascist and racist impulses. As politics, it isn't terribly illuminating: Its depiction of underclass, xenophobic rage is shocking in its brutality but hardly revelatory in its insight. As a psychological interrogation, it's more compelling, plunging the viewer into the mind of a disturbed man without sugarcoating. It's this brazen willingness to shove something so repellent in its audience's face that makes I Stand Alone both a courageous movie and an unpleasant experience. Whether the movie is genuinely probing or merely preoccupied with provocation is up for debate. What's not is the movie's visceral impact: This unrelenting essay about a lumpen brute sticks with you, despite -- or perhaps because of -- its lacerating bleakness. ~ Elbert Ventura, All Movie Guide
Seul contre tous (English title: I Stand Alone or In The Bowels Of France - I Stand Alone) is a 1998 French film, written and directed by Gaspar Noé, and starring Philippe Nahon, Blandine Lenoir, Frankye Pain, and Martine Audrain.
The film focuses on several pivotal days in the life of a bitter former butcher as he rages against the world.
The history of the Butcher is narrated through voice-over and a montage of still photographs. Orphaned at a young age, he opened a butcher shop and fathered a mentally retarded daughter from a woman who later left him for another man. He raised his daughter, a mute, while fighting his incestuous feelings for her. On the day of her first period, he stabbed a man he thought had raped her. He went to jail, losing his job and his daughter. After being released, he took up with a woman who owned a tavern and she became pregnant. She sold her business and moved to northern France with him under the promise of opening a butcher shop. It is 1980.
The Butcher hates his life with his overbearing, overweight mistress. She backs out of her promise to open a butcher shop, forcing him to take a night watchman job at a nursing home. Along with a nurse, he witnesses an elderly patient die, and he ruminates on the pointlessness of life. He fails to capitalize on the nurse's vulnerability, but his mistress accuses him of having an affair nonetheless. He snaps and punches his mistress in the belly several times, very likely killing their unborn child, then steals a pistol and flees.
The Butcher determines to feel no guilt and return to Paris. He rents the same flophouse room where he conceived his daughter and begins looking up his old friends, but they are all too decrepit and poor to help him. The Butcher's interior monologues focus on his hatred of the rich and their exploitation of the lower class. He looks for butcher jobs, but the French economy is in recession and there are no jobs in any related field. After being turned away at a slaughterhouse that once did business with his shop, the Butcher decides to kill the manager. He plots the murder at a local tavern, but is ejected from the bar at gunpoint after squabbling with the owner's son. The Butcher finds that he has only three bullets in his gun, and begins assigning them to each of his various enemies.
He eventually decides to see his daughter. After meeting her at the asylum in which she is a patient, he takes her back to his room and hesitates, looking at his gun. He has sex with her and then attempts to kill her with a shot to the head, but misses and hits her throat. As she bleeds in agony and the landlord pounds on the door, the Butcher uses his second bullet to finish her off. His mind in chaos, the Butcher collapses and shoots himself in the head. The movie returns to the moment of the Butcher's hesitation. He puts the gun away, resolving to be good, and tearfully embraces his daughter. Then there is a close up of him spreading his daughter's legs in the same way he spread her mother's legs. Standing at a window, he unzips his daughter's jacket and begins fondling her. His interior monologue asserts that their love is more pure because the world condemns it.
The camera is usually stationary throughout the film, but this trend is sometimes contrasted by abrupt, rapid movements of the camera. The sudden movements are always accompanied by a loud sound effect, usually an explosive gunshot. A notable exception is the final crane shot, which moves gently away from the Butcher's window and turns to look down an empty street.
The film frequently cuts to title cards that display a variety of messages. The cards often repeat a notable word spoken by the Butcher, such as "Morality" and "Justice". At the film's climax, a "Warning" title card counts down 30 seconds under the pretext of giving viewers an opportunity to stop watching and avoid the remainder of the film.
Film connections
The film is a sequel to Noé's short film Carne. The Butcher also makes a cameo appearance at the beginning of Irréversible, Noe's follow-up to I Stand Alone. In a drunken monologue, the Butcher reveals that he was arrested for having sex with his daughter.
