Seul Contre Tous / I Stand Alone (1998) - Gaspar Noé
Related: 1998 films - Gaspar Noé - French film - representation of rape in fiction
Seul Contre Tous / I Stand Alone (1998) - Gaspar Noé
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Seul contre tous (English title: I Stand Alone) is a French film directed by Gaspar Noé and released in 1998. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seul_contre_tous [Feb 2006]Gratingly unsympathetic misanthrope commits shocking violent act in northern industrial city, flees south to the capital where he rants against the ills of society and plots revenge. Seul Contre Tous share its basic structure with Mike Leigh’s Naked, and it’s not hard to imagine David Thewlis’s snarling Johnny developing into a 50-year-old as murderously pissed-off as Philippe Nahon’s borderline-psychotic former horse-meat butcher Chevalier. But Noe brings us even closer to our anti-hero, as his is mainly a relentless, somewhat monotonous interior monologue. Though Chevalier is outwardly taciturn, his mental processes are, as we hear, not so much stream-of-consciousness as torrent-of-bile.
It’s hard to imagine a more unpleasant character with which to spend an hour and a half than this racist, sexist, homophobic self-hater – which is precisely Noe’s intention. His later Irreversible is even more of an ordeal, targetting the ears and eyes as well as the brain, but Seul Contre Tous is no mere dry run in terms of putting us through the wringer: an early horrific eruption of violence, in which Chevalier viciously kicks and punches his pregnant partner (aptly-named Frankye Pain) in the stomach, will be too much for some viewers.[...] --Neil Young in http://www.jigsawlounge.co.uk/film/seulcontretous.html
The soundtrack features the Canon in D major by Pachelbel.
* The credits features a list of thank yous consisting solely of filmmakers including Dario Argento, Nicolas Boukhrief, Marc Caro, Albert Dupontel, Samuel Fuller, Christophe Gans, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Mathieu Kassovitz, Jan Kounen, Francis Leroi, Quentin Tarantino & Shinya Tsukamoto.
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