I Stand Alone

... or MOSQUITO DER SHANDER, as this German Astro release puts it.

Gaspar Noe's stunning directorial feature debut is the most jarring and memorable film of the 1990s. It's also one of the most gripping foreign language films you will ever see.

Whether it is a horror film or not is debatable. I would argue that it is - despite it having stronger affiliations with TAXI DRIVER than, say, THE BEYOND or LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT. But if it's sex and gore you're after - and don't mind something a little more demanding than the average Fulci-fest (not that I'm dissing the maestro!) - you've come to the right place. Admittedly the S & G are not abundant, but when they come they are very shocking indeed.

The film wastes no time in getting it's viewer into the mind of it's lead male narrator - a jobless butcher (Philippe Nahon) who tells us his life story over the opening credits. The nameless butcher talks us breathlessly through his younger days - adopted, abused, married, divorced, imprisoned - a wasted life. His biggest regret is that his mute daughter (the only thing he admits to ever loving) has been institutionalised due to his long-term imprisonment - her mother abandoned them.

Incidently, the reason he was imprisoned was for stabbing someone in the face when he wrongly suspected them of raping his daughter. To make matters worse for himself, the butcher leaves his hometown with his new pregnant girlfriend, in search of a new life - leaving his daughter incarcerated in a mental home.

Then, with a false hint of optimism he tells us that today - the opening point of the movie's 'present-day' setting - is a new beginning. He's resetting the counter to nil.

And for a brief time (about 30 secs!) things are looking up for the butcher as he travels from Paris to a new district of France and plans to buy a butcher's shop with his girlfriend's - a former bar owner - money. But things swiftly turn sour as the couple move in with the girlfriend's mother. The girlfriend keeps a tight hold of the purse strings and grows ever more repulsive in the butcher's eyes. The mother meanwhile finds him a low-paid job as a hospital attendant. In his narrative, it's clear the butcher hates them both - he even fantasises about making love to them at the same time, and accuses them of being "sick" for enjoying it!!

Bitter and resentful that his new start in life has led to nothing, the butcher is then led to further distress when he watches an ederly patient die at the hospital. The young nurse who also witnesses this event is understandably upset, and our narrator walks her home. Not through compassion, but because she is pretty (!). He then retires to a cinema and contemplates his miserable life while watching a hardcore porn film - which we get a few brief glimpses of (these scenes were 'optically blurred' in the UK VHS release).

Upon his return home, the girlfriend announces that her friend saw him walking a woman home, and accuses him of having an affair. The butcher explodes and punches her belly several times yelling obscenities like "Your baby is hamburger meat now". This is one tough scene - not only is the beating disturbing, but Noe lingers on the aftermath for an age as the woman sobs in her mother's arms uncontrollably. It is harrowing and compelling in equal measures.

Our narrator goes on the run after finding a gun loaded with two bullets in the mother's house, and returns to his hometown looking for work or, at the very least, a loan from his old freinds. Finding neither, he grows more bitter by the minute and eventually decides to meet his daughter for the first time in years.

He takes his daughter to the cheap hotel room in which she was conceived, and ultimately decides whether she should live in a world of pain, or die. Or ... be shown love by the only person who truly loves her ...

Adding to this confusion, our narrator has a parallel problem - he has a number of people he plans to use his two bullets on (including himself).

This film is brilliant. It's script is totally compelling - although it's ultimately a stream-of-consciousness rant againt society, it is very absorbing and plausible. The main comparison I can draw from TAXI DRIVER is that both movies successfully portray a psychotic character in a manner that is not only realistic, but scary in the sense that we can look at them and identify with some of their psycho-babble. Here, Nahon's character HATES everyone. Kids, foreigners, even the "Nazi-loving French" - everyone. He is the most authentically drawn misanthropist I've ever seen on the screen. Beyond reasoning, yet - albeit however briefly - capable of sounding rational. But be warned: his narrative diatribe is spat out very quickly at times - slow readers may have trouble keeping up with the subtitles.

Despite an ambiguous ending that fails to conclude the story satisfactorily (actually, after about the 5th viewing I made my own interpretation of the ending and I'm sticking to it - I'm happy now!!), this is thoroughly satisfying. There's only one bonafide gore scene, but when it arrives you'll see how important it was to keep the rest of the film gore-free - it will shock!!!

But aside from a couple of truly shocking scenes, the real chemistry here exists between Nahon's believable performance and the brilliant hate-fuelled script. Based in the unemployment-heavy 80s and making many political statements along it's way, it's a flim far more clever than perhaps is apparent upon first viewing. The editing plays a big part too, with long shots intercut with sudden gun-shot sounds on the soundtrack, accompanied with jump-cuts to title cards.

The disc is poor. The film is presented in the original theatrical aspect ratio of 2.35:1, but is not anamorphic. It also has French audio only with burnt-in English subtitles. Extras? None. Well, none relating to the movie itself. You get a couple of trailers for non-genre fluff, and that's it - bizarrely, there's no I STAND ALONE trailer?!

The picture quality is equivalent to VHS, but no better. Sound is Dolby mono and is efficient.

So if you have the ALLIANCE ATLANTIS VHS release (also in 2.35:1), you'd be well advised to keep ahold of it - if you can live wthout the 20-odd seconds of explicit humping that the BBFC unexplicably found indecent. But for digital completists, this is a fantastic film on a disappointing disc that nevertheless doesn't suffer from grain or artifacting.

Nice cover, though.

NB A French release exists, with French language and no English subtitles. This does, however, include the short film THE BUTCHER which also stars Nahon in the same role (an earlier effort by the one-time Condom commercial director), and is apparently superior in picture quality ...

Review by Stuart Willis