aka Seul Contre Tous

• Written and directed by Gasper Noe
• Starring
  • Philippe Nahon
  • Blandine Lenoir
  • Frankye Pain
  • Martine Audrain

Dear God in heaven. I’m not prepared for this. I’ve build up plenty of callus to protect me from your average American bad movie, the kind made with tawdry intent and no artistic aspirations. But I don’t have the mental shielding necessary to deal with a piece of pretentious, self-indulgent, whiny tripe like this.

I originally turned this movie off after twenty minutes, disgusted that I had wasted time that could more profitably have been used carving random ZIP codes into my abdomen with a straight pin. When I took the DVD out of the player, it left skidmarks. But then I checked the IMDB and found that this floater has a rating of 7.7 (!!!), and that arthouse geeks were lining up to proclaim it a truly great piece of film. That’s when I knew that I had to gird up my loins and finish the damned thing just so that I could open a colossal can of whupass on it in this review.

Our hero.

We first get a five minute — five minute — introduction to our main character, in the form of still photographs accompanied by incessant narration. Boy, this fella likes his monologues. We learn all about his bland, unhappy life; his birth in France right before WW2, his quick orphaning thereafter, his trade as a butcher, his mute daughter whose mother abandoned them, his time in prison for mistaking his daughter’s first period as evidence that a neighbor raped her, his subsequent job at a bar and affair with the matron, and his current (1980) situation: Now living with the matron and her mother, trying to find a job until the matron’s baby is born and they can invest in another butcher shop.

Whee.

You’d think that, now that the stills are done, the movie would start to move. Hardly. The butcher, the matron and her mother are all intensely boring people to look at, and don’t do anything. We’ve got a movie largely composed of people standing around, looking blankly at each other, letting ten or fifteen seconds go by between a comment and the other person’s reply. Matching that is the consistently static camera, which really stands to reason — the people are about as vibrant and active as a collection of really dour Easter Island heads, so why bother renting a dolly? Apparently, whatever film school Gasper Noe went to never explained the “motion” part of the phrase “motion picture.” The only punctuation to all of this, which seems so intensely silly, is an occasional and sudden undercranked pull-in or pan, often accompanied by a vaguely-ominous musical chord. All while absolutely nothing is actually happening — just people standing around some more. The first few times I saw it, I thought it was supposed to be an ill-conceived parody on action movies. When it continued, without any apparent satirical intent, the only conclusion I could come to was that Gasper Noe was just as bored with the movie as I was, and was playing around just to keep himself awake.

Thrill to the nonstop chewing action!!!

So, what’s our scintillating storyline? Well, the butcher (the character has no other name) gets a job as a deli butcher in a supermarket, but gets fired because he never smiles. (Get a good fifteen-second shot of him not smiling just to prove it, okay?) Then he gets a job as a night watchman at a rest home. More footage of him sitting around (ooh, that’s an exciting crossword you’re filling out, butcher-boy!), accompanied by his tedious inner monologue on how he hates his life and everyone around him. Then he accompanies a nurse to the bedside of an elderly woman, who dies on them. Then he walks the nurse home. Then he keeps walking. For five damned minutes, we have footage of the butcher walking the streets of Lille, France. Why? So that we can have yet more of his tedious, banal, inane monologue — about how love is false, everyone is alone, nothing’s worth anything, life sucks. (Gee, I especially like the part where he says that anyone who believes in love of any kind is deluded. That’s right, he’s had a sucky life, so he’s unwilling to admit that anyone could have it any better.) It’s trite, it’s shallow, and it’s interminable.

Then, with the monologue still rambling on, he goes into a porno theater. And lo and behold, I get treated to some clips from the screen. Yup, full vaginal penetration is exactly what this movie was missing. Thanks. (Again, that’s pretty much an open admission that this movie’s as boring as watching concrete crumble, and they needed something to pizzazz it up. The fact that they had to go all the way to hardcore porn for a sufficient level of pizzazz tells you how glacially dull the movie is.)

And this — this, folks — is the twenty minute mark. I’ve got another hour and a half to go, trapped in the head of a dull, sour, bitter, unimaginative, angry, isolated, washed-up, tired butcher. For where we are is hell,/and where hell is, there must we ever be…

Boy, that’s a fascinating light switch. I’m so glad the camera maintains this position for five freaking minutes.

After his continuous whine through the porn movie, he eventually wanders home in the evening to find his woman quite understandably put out and suspicious as to his whereabouts. Their fight quickly gets nasty, and he ends it by punching her repeatedly in the stomach until the fetus is dead. Then he grabs the mother’s hidden gun, threatens them, and leaves, feeling sorry for himself and cursing the women for all they did to him. Like, presumably, conniving into getting him to kill an unborn baby with their feminine wiles.

More walking, as his internal monologue just keeps going on and on, talking about regaining his dignity (please, don’t make me vomit) and how everyone’s mean to poor little him. Then he hitches a ride into Paris (where he, “a real human being,” can be among people like himself), and by morning, thanks to an innate sense of irony, he’s gotten himself a room in the very cheap hotel where his daughter was conceived fifteen years ago. The same room, in fact. Which we hear about. Endlessly.

Having only 300 francs to his name (the room taking 60 per day), he does what any real human being does when trying to regain his dignity: he visits all his old friends, looking for work or a handout. Alas, the economy’s bad, and the people he knows aren’t exactly movers and shakers, so they each shake their heads sadly that a baby-killing sociopath can’t get a job at the drop of a hat. The butcher himself exhibits yet another of his pathetic cases of cognitive dissonance, both bemoaning the general recession and yet blathering on endlessly (for our benefit, of course) about how anyone not giving him a job on the spot is a faggot or a Nazi bastard. Naturally, all of this is accomplished on foot, so while we listen to his tiresome and petulant violent fantasies of what he plans to do to these people (he’s still got that gun, with a whopping three bullets), we are privileged to watch — wait, don’t tell me — more walking.

“But if I kill my mirror universe double, then all his whiny petulance will be added to my own!”

And because he’s a man on a limited budget who’s trying to regain his dignity, he of course blows a wad on a skinny New-Agey hooker so that he can then complain about her afterward for not offering herself for free to such a fine specimen of humanity. And then he gets into a fight in a bar, insulting the wrong person out of the blue (disparaging his sexuality, naturally) and getting the wrong end of a shotgun pointed in his face for his troubles. Gosh, life just isn’t fair, is it? I mean, what kind of world is it when a sullen jackass can’t make homophobic insults to a stranger out of the blue without being thrown out like a drunken lout?

After raging away at just about everyone and everything for most of the night, including contemplating suicide just to get away from the injustices heaped on poor little him, he then decides to go and see his daughter Cynthia (Blandine Lenoir), a mute blank-eyed fifteen-year-old. He takes her from the institution to go and “see the Eiffel Tower,” which gives us an occasion to see them together on the train for a long stretch, not speaking. Ah, the drama. He instead takes her back to the hotel room — the very one in which she was conceived, you know — and –

Ooh, now it’s going to get good, right? Because a big placard fills the screen, warning us that things are about to get brutal, and we have thirty seconds to leave the theater if we don’t want to be offended. (William Castle would be proud, though I’m sure Gasper Noe would turn his haughty French nose up in disgust if anyone suggested that he had borrowed from such a showman — this, after all, is Art.) The card even counts down for us the full thirty seconds, but we needn’t feel like we’re missing anything by seeing nothing but the countdown for all that time, because we are kept company by the butchers perpetual stream of self-pitying faux-moralizing drivel. And when the countdown is up…

“Yes, I can see where she got her scintillating conversational skills.”

…he fondles his daughter a bit, then, deciding that his parental responsibility to her is to remove her from this oh-so-unfair world and shoots her through the neck. She lies on the floor, blood spurting from her jugular, as he blows her brains across the hardwood. This was, assuredly, the brutality from which the placard kindly tried to spare us. Of course, since the movie has studiously kept me from building any sympathy at all for either the shooter or the shootee, it was simply a hollow moment whose only value was in the fact that the end of the movie must therefore be closer. (Compare this scene to, say, the coffeetable death in Heathers in order to realize how badly Noe failed in embuing this violent episode with any sort of emotional impact.)

But even that is neutered, because just as the butcher puts the gun to his own jaw and pulls the trigger on the last bullet, we snap back to the moment that he pulled the gun from its hiding place. Congratulations, the whole murder scene was his imagination. Instead, he puts the gun back, goes to his daughter, and fondles her. And our last image is of the boring street outside, with the thrice-damned monologue explaining that he’s deciding whether to have sex with his daughter or not, because it would feel good to do something nice for himself for a change.

The end.

Let me make this clear, in case you haven’t picked up on it yet. I HATED this movie. I hated it to a degree that I didn’t think possible. This is far beyond any emotion generated by an unintentionally inept movie, which at worst only inspires derision. But here we have a self-professed artiste who’s managed to sell a bunch of arthouse junkies on his own invisible suit of clothes. It’s not bad enough that it’s visually moribund, or narratively leaden. No, we are forced to endure scene after tiresome scene that serves as nothing more than screensaver while our main character’s redundant, trite, petulant, intellectually immature, self-serving, sociopathic musings are retched forth at us. There is no wit here; there is no insight. This movie is not, as the groupie comments on the IMDb would have you believe, a “pensive, daring film,” a “convincingly fiendish love story,” or “a truly original vision;” it does not feature “intelligent direction, and startingly astute script.” It is, instead, an utter failure on all levels — failing to engage the emotions, appeal to the intelligence, or entertain the senses. It’s simply an exercise in endurance, forcing the audience to submit to the company of a small, stupid man for an hour and a half, finally releasing them to try and rationalize some benefit from the experience so that it won’t seem a total waste.

I wouldn’t be surprised if I receive angry and condescending mail on this one. I don’t care. Your opinions will be duly dismissed as those of someone who thinks that the Emperor’s new clothes are really keen, and you will be sent on your way with the admonition to beg, borrow, or steal a clue. And don’t try to tell me that this is some sort of triumph of “realism.” Somehow, I don’t see that the extreme stylization of a perpetual monologue smacks of realism to me. And anyway, realism is scarcely an artistic achievement. Real is easy; art is hard. I certainly don’t need someone to go to great lengths to construct an artificial “realism” which lacks in depth, color, and character to the real thing. I also wouldn’t appreciate someone presenting me with an artificial dog turd — almost indistinguishable from the real thing! — and holding it under my nose for ninety minutes, poking it occasionally to make sure the smell stays pungent.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 2 (yes, I’m counting the fetus)
• breasts: 1
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0
• and I’ll be damned if I’m starting tally categories for penises or hardcore penetrations