Film: Seus Contre Tous
Release date: 19th March 1999
Release date: 19th March 1999
Certificate: 18
Running time: 93 mins
Director: Gaspar Noé
Starring: Philippe Nahon, Blandine Lenoir, Frankie Pain, Martine Audrain, Jean-François Rauger
Genre: Crime/Drama
Studio: Film OfficeFormat: DVD
Country: France
Gaspar Noe’s debut feature focuses on The Butcher, a character introduced in his short film Carne, in which he murders a man he thinks has raped his retarded daughter – but who had actually only been bloodied by her first period.
In Seul Contre Tous, we follow The Butcher a few months after his release from prison - a lengthy narration explaining how he had returned to Paris to find himself unemployed. Developing a relationship with the manageress of a bar, the action picks up at her mother’s flat where we find the couple have re-located, leaving the city with her promise that she’ll use her saved money to help him set up a new butcher’s shop. Unable to find a location pleasing to his pregnant girlfriend, and patron, The Butcher begins to resent her more than ever, and ends up taking a night job at an old people’s home in order to escape the claustrophobia of their small flat. Comforting a nurse after a traumatic incident on his shift, his girlfriend accuses him of infidelity – at which point he snaps, aborting their child with his repeated pounding of her stomach with his fists.
Taking her mother’s gun, he returns to Paris, with only a few Francs and that steel in his pockets. From here we follow his increasing alienation as his friends turn him away, and he is unable to even get a job working at his former suppliers. Alone with his thoughts, his mind becomes increasingly deranged by revenge fantasies driven by misogyny, homophobia and racism. And for the final act, he decides to reunite with his now teenaged daughter, who had been sent to a home since his incarceration, and who he has since become increasingly infatuated with…
The DVD tagline reads: “If you saw this man walking towards you, you would cross the street. Director Gaspar Noe decides, instead, to take a walk inside his brain.” No kidding! Not only a cool hook to watch the movie, this is a statement of intent. Many scenes are spent watching The Butcher charge with tightly-wound intensity down destitute streets, the camera static, the viewer instead dragged along the murky tides of a consciousness streaming over the images. Dialogue between characters is sparse, but the internal monologue comes gushing like an over-flowing sewer, his tirades against humanity imbued with poetic malevolence. These often stationary shots will surprise many coming to this film on the back of Noe’s later works, in which he has displayed a maverick, and sometimes quite unbelievable, handling of the camera. But the directorial style displayed in this debut, and the low-grade quality of the film stock used is well-suited to the tautness of the script, the inner torment of the character, and the grime of the desolate city through which he rages. And the neat stylistic flourishes that Noe does employ hit even harder for their sporadic use.
In Seul Contre Tous, we follow The Butcher a few months after his release from prison - a lengthy narration explaining how he had returned to Paris to find himself unemployed. Developing a relationship with the manageress of a bar, the action picks up at her mother’s flat where we find the couple have re-located, leaving the city with her promise that she’ll use her saved money to help him set up a new butcher’s shop. Unable to find a location pleasing to his pregnant girlfriend, and patron, The Butcher begins to resent her more than ever, and ends up taking a night job at an old people’s home in order to escape the claustrophobia of their small flat. Comforting a nurse after a traumatic incident on his shift, his girlfriend accuses him of infidelity – at which point he snaps, aborting their child with his repeated pounding of her stomach with his fists.
Taking her mother’s gun, he returns to Paris, with only a few Francs and that steel in his pockets. From here we follow his increasing alienation as his friends turn him away, and he is unable to even get a job working at his former suppliers. Alone with his thoughts, his mind becomes increasingly deranged by revenge fantasies driven by misogyny, homophobia and racism. And for the final act, he decides to reunite with his now teenaged daughter, who had been sent to a home since his incarceration, and who he has since become increasingly infatuated with…
The DVD tagline reads: “If you saw this man walking towards you, you would cross the street. Director Gaspar Noe decides, instead, to take a walk inside his brain.” No kidding! Not only a cool hook to watch the movie, this is a statement of intent. Many scenes are spent watching The Butcher charge with tightly-wound intensity down destitute streets, the camera static, the viewer instead dragged along the murky tides of a consciousness streaming over the images. Dialogue between characters is sparse, but the internal monologue comes gushing like an over-flowing sewer, his tirades against humanity imbued with poetic malevolence. These often stationary shots will surprise many coming to this film on the back of Noe’s later works, in which he has displayed a maverick, and sometimes quite unbelievable, handling of the camera. But the directorial style displayed in this debut, and the low-grade quality of the film stock used is well-suited to the tautness of the script, the inner torment of the character, and the grime of the desolate city through which he rages. And the neat stylistic flourishes that Noe does employ hit even harder for their sporadic use.
As if a reverse of Irreversible, where rumbling frequencies and eternally spinning cameras suddenly stop dead at the pivotal scene, making the rape all the more violent for what would, in other ways, be a less controversial depiction than the eroticised images found elsewhere, here we find moments where the slow pacing suddenly shoots like a bullet. Quite literally – the frames speed up, the camera zooms forward and screams to a halt at the sound of a gunshot ringing out from nowhere. Other stylistic spikes include occasional and unexpected one-note orchestral strikes, jump-cuts that close-in on The Butcher’s ever emptying pockets to transport him between locations, and Noe’s trademark title cards, making their debut here. The most infamous of these being the warning that proceeds the final act: “YOU HAVE 30 SECONDS TO LEAVE THE SCREENING OF THIS FILM.”
This (literal) countdown shares the nihilistic charm that made Tarantino’s early films so intriguing, though the most obvious reference point here is, of course, Scorcese’s Taxi Driver. Like Travis Bickle, The Butcher perceives himself as a lone warrior in streets full of scum, and the homage is made refreshingly obvious with the character’s placing at a porno theatre; at night-duty to deal with his restlessness; his inability to form substantial relationships; and his return to a city that no longer makes any sense to him. But while Scorcese had a young, raffish, Bobby DeNiro as his anti-hero, here Noe makes the quite impressive achievement of employing an actor that is as aesthetically unwelcoming as his internal attitudes – no disrespect to Phillip Nahon, but that tagline really is accurate – yet is still immensely watchable.
A common theme emerging through Noe’s movies is the deranged beauty that greets the end of the violence, sex, and anger, that drives his movies. Irreversible, with its pregnancy (sweet in its sequenced conclusion, horrific in its chronological implication), Enter The Void with the deceased lead’s rebirth (as a child to the sister he incestuously craves), and here we find resolution, or at least dissolution of the rage fuelling the flick, with The Butcher’s revival of his relationship with the mother of the child who left them, through that child she left behind.
Seul Contre Tous is sure to divide viewers between those who wonder why he bothers and those startled by the delivery of his wild visions. But anyone who watches this film will find its images deeply imprinted, long after the screen burns back to static. JGZ
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