seul contre tous (w&d gaspar noé)

What a turgid, provocative film Noé’s opening gambit proves to be. Because it feels like a gambit: an opening move in a career that will seek to provoke and shock. It was, as we now know, though he would not have known it back then, a brilliantly effective ploy which catapulted Noé into the international superstar director firmament, where he has remained ever since. It is a classic case of someone putting something together that the regulation powers-that-be would have said could never work. And to be fair, it doesn’t work all that well as a film. SCT is leaden, weighed down by a misrerabilist voiceover and a crushing despondency. The lead actor, is uncharismatic, and morally odious. There is nothing about this film which suggests it will be hailed in the future as a classic.

Except - for two things. One is the shock value and Noé is bold enough to go all out here, to hold nothing back. In truth, the shocking scenes are few and far between and sandwiched between the long voiceovers as the mordant butcher walks the streets, muttering to himself. But when they come they are truly unpleasant, worthy of Lautréamont at his most savage. Noé puts a card up sometime before the last one, advising that we have 30 seconds to leave the theatre, and counts those seconds down. It’s a showman’s Godardian (Brechtian?) device which works beautifully. These stylistic flourishes complement the dour tone of the film as a whole. But the other thing SCT succeeds in doing is capturing a Parisian world which feels like it is on the point of imploding. This is not a pretty city. It is full of ugly walls and dark corners. The people are ugly. The mood is ugly. Noé wallows in this ugliness, celebrating it, in the way he will celebrate cities with colour and flair in his later films. And this celebration of ugliness is truly iconoclastic. Paris, the great beauty, is transformed into a dull post-industrial sludge.

In so doing, Noé describes an era before turbo-charged capitalism transformed so many occidental and oriental cities into showpieces for an aspirational consumerism with a surgical, Artaudian grotesqueness. The ambivalent ending is a harbinger of everything that will come in the film’s wake. You could write a whole thesis about the final shot, which leaves both the characters and the audience staring into a world/ void which could be construed as hopeful, whilst also being morally compromised beyond repair.