I Stand Alone
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
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Put more simply, I Stand Alone is a movie that removes your head, fucks with it for a while, and then hands it back to you. I wonder what the late Samuel Fuller–perhaps the filmmaker most interested in hatred and how it functions–would have made of it.
There are two very violent scenes, one near the beginning and one near the end, and women are the victims in both. Yet the feeling of violence in the movie is nearly constant, thanks to the way the narrative is constructed. Violence is present in the butcher’s stream-of-consciousness narration–most of it a torrential rant of complaint, abuse, and negativity driven by a xenophobic virulence that restores a sense of obscenity to language (no mean feat given the current climate). And it’s felt in every punctuating offscreen gunshot and plucked note, which is usually accompanied by an abrupt and jarring cut or camera movement. These percussive bursts place the butcher’s imagined violence on an equal plane with the much rarer bursts of violence we actually see and the still rarer violent acts he commits rather than imagines he commits. Every time we hear a gunshot or a sudden plucked note, our reflexes tell us that the threat of violence has just been carried out–until we realize that it’s only been imagined, by the butcher and therefore by us. By the end of the film–which offers two horrific conclusions, neither of which may be “true”–it’s apparent that our imagination and the butcher’s are not only difficult to separate from each other but virtually impossible to distinguish from the events of the story.
By the time he gets out of jail, the butcher has lost his shop. He goes to work at a bar, becoming the matron’s lover and getting her pregnant. She proposes selling the bar, moving with him to her mother’s flat in a Lille suburb, and leasing a meat market. He accepts, but after she fails to lease a market, he grows rancorous and frustrated, especially after he’s fired from a job at a deli because he refuses to smile. (It’s now early 1980, when the remainder of the story takes place, and the film shifts from past to present tense.)
As for his moral agenda, I’m not convinced by his various pronouncements in interviews that even he has a clear understanding of what it is. I’m more inclined to go with D.H. Lawrence’s directive to trust the tale and not the teller. It’s a tale with two endings–one of them tragic, culminating in murder and suicide, and the other “happy,” culminating in sex and romance–and the movie essentially dares you to pick which one you prefer. Whichever choice you make, the movie forces you to squirm at the implications of your preference. This apparently drove one of my New York colleagues so crazy she wound up describing the second conclusion as the “most redemptive” ending in a film since Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket, a remark that startled me as much as anything in Noe’s film. For one thing, it conjures up a surrealist image of a redemption race in which all potentially redemptive films since Pickpocket leave the starting gate at the same time and only one is declared the winner. For another, it manages to postulate as comparable forms of redemption an incarcerated pickpocket’s recognition of his love for his girlfriend, expressed through the bars of his cell to the strains of Jean-Baptiste Lully, and the butcher’s rationalization of having sex with his own daughter, delivered to the strains of syrupy pseudo-Baroque music.
