Dir. Gaspar Noé Starring Philippe Nahon, Blandine Lenoir, and Frankye Pain 93 min.
Director Gaspar Noé takes us deep into the mind of a deranged butcher driven to the edge—and beyond—as he surrenders to nihilistic impulses found in the darkest recesses of repressed souls. An unrelenting portrait of proletarian rage and despair, I Stand Alone (Seul Contre Tous) of 1998 follows a laborer as his life goes from bad to worse, as he loses his wife, then his job, and then his will to live. Left with nothing, he tumbles into depression and surrenders to destructive impulses, all the while revealing his psychotic thoughts in psychobabble voiceover. Noé’s unsparing vision is in full fruition here, plunging into the relentlessly downward-spiraling storm of hopelessness of certain social castoffs.
