I Stand Alone

Capsule Film Review #28

This is the twenty-eighth in a series of short pieces (max. 250 words) about films. They appear weekly, in addition to my regular essays.

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There would seem to be a number of good reasons to disregard the work of Gaspar Noé. Superficially, he seems as tiresome as the later Godard (himself only slightly more tiresome than the earlier Godard), and for the same reasons: filled with the sort of cinematic affectations that interest no one outside of universities, his films scream Art! from the title cards onwards. Worse still, they scream Philosophy! They are all, furthermore, written on the body: his cinema, as one of his characters says, is the cinema of blood and semen and tears.

All of this could be dismissed as adolescent provocation, as indeed could the act of making a film, like I Stand Alone (1998), from the point of view of an incestuous, unemployed National Front supporter. But if it is adolescent, it is not only adolescent: it is also human, just as those artists who look only at the True and the Beautiful and never at the toilet can seem, precisely, inhuman.

Many of those artists can see readily enough that (say) some daughters are raped by their fathers, but they do not really see the fathers. Everyone pretends that we never see such things from the victim’s perspective, but usually that is all we do: to see it from the perpetrator’s perspective is truly hard.

If Truth is Beauty, though, this is Beauty: for this man’s life is true, as well. He is human, just as we are; he defecates, he gets angry, he stands alone.

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