MovieMartyr.com - I Stand Alone

It’s not often that I feel it’s necessary to play the moral repugnance card that seems popular with many film critics when discussing controversial fare, but I think with I Stand Alone Gaspar Noé’s portrait of a sociopathic, French ex-butcher, I’ll have to do just that. It’s not that I was disturbed by the movie, though, so much as disturbed by its intentions. Noé takes us inside the twisted mind of his protagonist here, but he never attempts to examine it, since to do so would require a perspective that would take us outside of this point of view. For the duration of the movie, we’re stuck, for better or worse, down in the muck with him, and after spending ninety minutes with him we don’t exactly have a deeper understanding than we had a few minutes in. The film is often compared to Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, since both film’s feature a supremely alienated lead who narrates his disgust with society, but Scorsese wrapped his tale up in an ironic wit that provided a bit of release to those in the audience that didn’t sympathize with Travis Bickle. Noé doesn’t do anything of the sort here, and while that is certainly aesthetically brave, it doesn’t give the audience anything to think about besides the drone of his anti-hero’s thoughts. Watching the film, I realized that I could withstand nearly any amount of exploitation of the characters in a film, so long as I myself didn't feel I was being exploited by the director. I don't mind feeling uncomfortable as long as I know that I'll have some sort of understanding or reward at the end of my torment, but Noé doesn't uphold his end of that bargain here. By the end of the film, I had become numb to their content due to overexposure, and since the movie lost it visceral kick (even Noé’s shock tactics – most notably a randomly sounded gunshot / quick pan - are repeated until they’re impotent) it lost its ability to make me feel I was experiencing an altered reality. It simply felt like I was watching a director attempting to impress me (a feeling hammered home when an intertitle warns the squeamish members of the audience to flee before it ratchets the action up a gear), and since he had to resort to such extremes as racism, incest, violent murder, and misogyny to do so, I resented it.

Noé apparently expanded this material from a forty minute short, and it shows in its thematic simplicity. Though the filmmaking is undeniably impressive at times, it doesn’t have anything that most viewers could relate to morally for most of its running time. Its constant voiceover track, which provides an endless stream of profanity and racism, left me mildly uncomfortable, but mostly it left me a bit bored and numbed. Even worse though, in the last few minutes, the movie attempts to make its lead sickly sympathetic, and the results are disastrous. The music swells, and the camera pulls away, suggesting there’s a bit of humanity residing in the protagonist, but if we’re to accept this compassionate view, we need to forget the previous hour and a half, which I imagine most people won’t be willing to do. Why most people would be willing to sit through this film is beyond me, especially since Noé can’t sustain the shock that he initially achieves. Certainly, there are visual pleasures in I Stand Alone, but they don’t redeem the depraved heart that beats at the center of the film.

* 1/2

06-30-02

Jeremy Heilman