I Stand Alone

I STAND ALONE (1998) ***1/2

Reviewed 3/21/99

I Stand Alone has been compared to Taxi Driver, and they have their similarities. Both main characters are loners despising the society around them. The nameless butcher here talks to himself in front of a mirror, even barking threats to people not present. Like Travis Bickle, he has a penchant for pornography. Scorsese however does not provide Bickle with the running tirade that first-time director Gasper Noe gives us. For the entire length of I Stand Alone, we are relentlessly barraged with the butcher's interior monologue -- hateful, misogynistic, racist, homophobic -- an attempt to capture France's disenfranchised far Right. Noe's problem is that by the time the film is over, it's hard to extrapolate the butcher as emblematic of anyone. The butcher is obviously psychotic.

I Stand Alone begins with the early history of the butcher. Both his parents died early. He was imprisoned when he mistook his daughter's first menstruation for her being raped and knifed a man to death who had been flirting with her. She was institutionalized. Now freed, the one-time butcher tries to live with his pregnant second-wife and mother-in-law without killing them both. He has a hard time finding work and his wife's constant pestering eventually causes him to explode. He returns to his old haunt in Paris where he faces poverty and perpetual rejection while looking for work. Lonely, he takes his now-grown daughter from the institution with incestuous designs on her.

Throughout the film, we get intertitles providing a thematic layout, and near the end, even a warning telling us we have 30 seconds to leave the theater before the forthcoming brutality. Without revealing what that is exactly, I will say that what makes the scene horrifying isn't the violence going over the top but rather its realistic depiction. This film is not for the faint of heart. Unfortunately what follows that, with its misuse of Pachelbel's Canon, leaves the film with a weak ending. I'm not rejecting what happens, but how it happens.

Still, Noe's ability to sustain a singleminded intensity throughout the film's entirety shows promise for his directorial future. Noe says for his next film, he wants to make something similar to In the Realm of the Senses. I wonder if Catherine Breillat's Romance will inhibit or further this desire.