All-time low

An ever-mounting catalog of human degradation makes the French film I Stand Alonefeel like Camus interpreted by a snuff filmmaker. Thirty-five-year-old Gaspar Noé’s first feature film opens as a viciously tongue-in-cheek anthem to individual self-determination of the most grotesque sort. A rousing patriotic march sounds out from the soundtrack as his film’s recitation of the two virtues: “Morality!” and “Justice!” are introduced, only to be given Noé’s own warped interpretation as the drama progresses. Such high-flying nationalistic phrasing makes a rude joke of the fatuous sense of higher cause underlying the most abysmal projects, including a jobless butcher’s base motivations. Through its racist, defeated butcher “hero,” I Stand Alone often feels like a carefully rigged joke: How much can we root for individualism and self-determination when such high-minded principles are used to such self-serving and amoral ends?

In the first 10 minutes of the film, Noé gives us the full flavor of its butcher antihero’s (Philippe Nahon) life - from his early abandonment by his mother, a father swallowed up by a death camp, the suggestion of virginity lost via homosexual rape and other life-defining nasties. Flash forward several decades to the nameless butcher’s abandonment of his own mute daughter as he (here a dreamy notion of beginning anew gets a brutal twist) starts his life over with a doughy, vile bar owner he’s knocked up and who’s promising to finance his butcher shop. A couple of Francis Bacon lumps of cold flesh, the relationship between the butcher and his money bag-with-legs is a repressed stream of vicious invective contained beneath a placid exterior.

I Stand Alone captures a kind of degradation that is probably not too uncommon - the kind of sociopathy that allows the butcher to, as the plot thickens, beat his enormously pregnant girlfriend into a certain abortion, thus setting off a chain of hard times culminating in an act you can’t say Noé doesn’t warn us about. Just before this final shock, a counter flashes onscreen and an announcement appears, warning of more unpleasant things ahead on the narrative horizon.

Noé’s surgical editing style makes you jump out of your skin, as assaultive and relentless as his grim content. His favorite technique is a loud clap on the soundtrack and a sudden jolting zoom, which zeroes in on some detail - a pathetic, junkie hooker fondling a tiny stuffed animal, the ratty expression of a neighbor with black-rimmed eyes and evilly fried red hair as she prepares to tattle on the butcher.

I Stand Alone is an entirely plausible, authentic-feeling journey through one man’s polluted consciousness. The butcher lives his entire existence rationalizing his abhorrent actions as his justice for the cards dealt him, and Noé captures bluntly, scabrously, a man whose existence comes with no other drive than self-preservation. Coupled with its idiosyncratic style - with scenes bathed in sulphurous light and astounding compositions that tend to place the butcher’s scrappy meatball form against acres of concrete buildings in the depressing outer boroughs of Paris - such psychological verité might create enough of a lining to keep Noé’s acidic film from eating away at your stomach lining.

The most troubling aspect of a film like I Stand Alone is how, every 10 years or so, a comparable film outrage comes down the pike: Salo, A Clockwork Orange, Taxi Driver Henry: Portrait of A Serial Killer, always upping the ante of what we think we can tolerate. In a matter of years, maybe less, I Stand Alone will look pitifully mild as it replays again and again in the cultural consciousness’s desensitization machine. But for now, Noé’s film leaves a guilty and unpleasant pang at watching something so accurate in depicting matters of stream-of-consciousness hatred and the vast, dark secrets of people’s thoughts and deeds that it may provide more enlightenment than many of us desire.