Director Alain Guiraudie
STAYING VERTICAL (Rester vertical) B
France (100 mi) 2016
‘Scope d: Alain Guiraudie
An erratic, hilariously funny, yet extremely bizarre film
that goes overboard on sexual indulgence mixed with comic absurdity, that was
apparently inspired by news stories of wolves returning to France, where
Guiraudie has fashioned himself something of a Charlie Kaufman screenplay
featuring a procrastinating screenwriter driving his Renault around the rural
country roads of France suffering from writer’s block. That makes this a road movie, of sorts,
though there are plenty of stops along the way, veering into mythological fantasy
sequences and an exploration of the surreal.
While the story itself couldn’t be more offbeat and wacky, it retains
the same cool precision of the director’s earlier film, Stranger
By the Lake (L'inconnu du lac) (2013), using a surgical yet outrageous
style to convey an anxiety-ridden, inner turmoil of eccentric characters who
are mostly seen in deadpan expressions.
The lead character Léo (Damien Bonnard) is an everyman kind of guy with
no distinct personality, known for having recurring telephone conversations
with his agent about a long overdue script that he claims is nearly completed,
though he hasn’t written a word, that invariably end with Léo asking, “Could
you wire me 3000 euros?” As he travels
the roadways, he encounters a young teenage kid on the side of the road, Yoan
(Basile Meilleurat), doubling back to ask him if he’d like to be in a film,
adding a homoerotic subtext, telling him, “You don’t see too many faces like
yours around here,” but is resoundingly rejected. Not taking no for an answer, it’s clear Léo
has something else in mind, but the kid is not interested, so instead he ends
up hiking through an open plateau of sheep grazing territory, where he
encounters a young shepherdess Marie (Linda Hair), who keeps a rifle by her
side on the lookout for wolves. Léo is
ecstatic about the possibility of seeing a wolf, where he thought it might only
be rumors. Marie’s view is vehemently
different, claiming they are a pest to the herd, a clear and present danger for
farmers in the region. While she wants
to kill them all, he values every life.
Next thing you know, the two are on the ground groping each other and
having a frenzied sexual encounter.
Inviting him to stay, their sexual tryst continues under the watchful
eyes of her two children along with her haggard-looking father Jean-Louis
(Raphaël Thiéry), who looks like a punch drunk boxer well past his prime who’s
taken a few too many blows to the head, leaving him constantly looking dazed
and confused, like a live version of the ogre Shrek, or something out of a
Bruno Dumont movie.
Léo appears to be something of a drifter, a perpetual
wanderer, who moves back and forth between the city and the outlying area, seen
in a tiny urban apartment slouched over a typewriter, making no progress
whatsoever on his screenplay, yet he always returns back to Marie, helping to
look after her unruly kids. Adding to
the weirdness, Guiraudie loves to show the nude female anatomy of Marie in a
close-up view of her genitalia along with her abdomen and ample breasts while
lying in bed, reminiscent of Gustave Courbet’s famous painting L’Origine du monde (11,000
× 9,113 pixels), quickly cutting to a graphically raw, live birth delivery,
complete with all the vaginal fluids intact in a scene that may be difficult to
forget, that may have some in the audience reeling in shocked surprise. Cleaned up and wrapped in a blanket, Marie
shows little interest in holding her baby, a duty that goes to Léo
instead. Next thing you know, Léo,
assuming Marie’s role, is out in the fields guarding the sheep, where off in
the distance he can see Marie and her two kids scampering away, abandoning Léo
and the baby, apparently suffering from postpartum depression, but also trapped
by the claustrophobic existence with her father, where she is clearly
unhappy. When Jean-Louis incredibly uses
the crying baby as bait to attract the wolves, placed out in the middle of an
open field while he stands nearby with a rifle, Léo, a born wanderer, has
little choice except to hit the road with a baby in his arms. When he returns looking for Yoan, what he discovers
appears to be an empty house with Pink Floyd music on full blast, though we
learn he’s ripped off the old man he takes care of, Marcel (Christian
Bouillette), a cantankerous, foul-mouthed old man who spews racist and
homophobic insults, calling the kid a thief and an ungrateful “little faggot”
who stole all his savings, among other things, suggesting he may have run off
to Australia. Crushed to be left all
alone, Léo befriends him and tries to help out, but he’s still got that
baby. In perhaps the strangest sequence,
Léo runs off to an enchanted forest to visit a new age psychotherapist in a
white coat using the latest natural methods, Doctor Mirande (Laure Calamy),
where she’s able to read his anxieties through the placement of plants on his
body, using them like an EKG electrocardiogram chest exam. As we see him row a canoe upstream through a
mythical forest, baby in tow, he hears the calling of his agent (Sébastien
Novac) looking for his script. Like a
deeply troubling dream, he panics and hides in the lush foliage, terrified that
he might be discovered, only to surface sometime later while the doctor and
agent are calmly having afternoon tea.
Léo can’t play the scriptwriting card anymore, leaving him
destitute and without income, yet still clinging to this baby, who has a kind
of Bressonian Au
Hasard Balthazar (1966) effect, as hardships seem to follow the baby
carrier, robbed and stripped naked by a group of homeless men, who attack him
like a pack of wolves, leaving him to wander the hinterlands completely
naked. With no place else to go, he
returns to Marcel, grumpier than ever as he feels abandoned and so close to
death, leading to one of the more intently sexualized visions of euthanasia
with Léo more than happy to oblige, erect penis and all, set to the rollicking
score of Pink Floyd. It’s a mindblowing
moment, the kind you won’t see anywhere else, made even more absurd when he’s
back on the run afterwards, yet shocked to discover a tabloid picture of
himself on the front page with headlines screaming “Man sodomizes, then
euthanizes, elderly man in front of his baby.”
Now thoroughly disgraced in the eyes of the public, his humiliation and
fall from grace is not complete until social services comes to take his baby
away from him, returning the infant back to the arms of the mother that never
wanted him in the first place (now with a familiar new boyfriend), as if that
provides some needed societal equilibrium.
Retreating back to the farm, where sexual advances by Jean-Louis were
previously rebuffed (though that itch is currently being scratched by someone
else), Léo sleeps out in the barn, never parting from the flock of sheep he
vows to protect. “Wolves Kill Here” is a
hand-made sign from Jean-Louis, a reminder of a terrible incident where several
of his sheep were slaughtered with no one watching over them, which is etched
indelibly in Léo’s mind. In the beginning
he expressed a kind of idealistic admiration for wolves, though now he’s come
full circle, realizing they are a predator threatening his sheep. This is a film that boldly creates plenty of
dead ends and misdirection, cryptically heading off-road into the mystic, as
Léo ends up as a kind of Christ-like mythological wayfarer, always showing more
compassion for others than for himself, the kind of person that would never
cause harm to anybody else, yet absorbs the constant wrath of others, mirroring
society’s pain and discontent. The
shepherding motif remains perplexing throughout, the idea of protecting the
lambs from the slaughter, yet equally curious is this idea that the wolf is
both within and without, depicting a sexual beast of unsuppressed desire that
lies within, contrasted against this surreal view of a dark Buñuelian universe
with wolves on the loose ready to devour their pray at any moment, suggesting
perhaps that we must learn to protect ourselves against our own predatory
instincts.
