I Stand Alone (1998)

Gaspar Noe, le enfant terrible de France, delights in a certain type of movie-making. He’s like your acquaintance who grabs you by the shirt collar and spits; “I’m going to kill you, fucker” in your face, and then passes it off as a joke. Why can’t you take the joke? Video Sewer has taken the joke, this time the joke is Noe’s I Stand Alone.

Yep, the protagonist here, though I’m hard-pressed to call this guy a protagonist, indeed stands alone. He’s the proponent of Noe’s first big-time cinematic philosophical salvo: we are born alone, live alone and die alone without hope, joy or any connection to life save our own corrupt urges. I love this guy.

Noe employs a restrained palette of styles to get his point across, namely numerous shots of our hero walking painfully alone through deserted streets, punctuated by frequent seemingly pointless jump-cuts accompanied by loud, sudden noises, like gun-shots or doors slamming. Throughout, we learn of our man’s lifelong decline, from a war orphan to failed horsemeat butcher, growing increasingly detached from and hateful of the cheese and Nazi-loving French, fat sow women, queers, Arabs and lazy rich who occasionally encroach on his benighted life.

The only reason we care a whit for this hopeless man is through the searing performance (almost entirely in voice-over) by Philippe Nahon, who manages to seed an odd type of pitiable logic in his character’s A to B mental destruction. Everyone else in The Butcher’s life is either totally hateful/ contemptible, or if compassionate, borderline mentally handicapped. Even The Butcher’s daughter - the victim of his malformed love and horrifying desire – is mute.

You will likely be so crushed by this depress-a-thon (complete with queasily realistic gunshots to neck and head for a finale) that you’ll welcome with parched grace the trailers included on this disc, wherein people actually talk to each other about how they are feeling.

I Stand Alone will remind you of your precious humanity by bashing your skull into the walls of a very sick man’s mind. That pitiless art like this seems to crop up more and more in the years surrounding the recent fin de siecle bodes ill for our ability to feel compassion in an exploding world. The necessity of such hardcore tactics remains to be seen, however, as it seems to me that the gentle sublimity of Sophia Coppola’s Lost In Translation arrives at a similar conclusion (for those looking for the message) without the pulses of arterial blood and hatred. Nonetheless, I Stand Alone packs a powerful, crass, brutish and thoughtful punch.